Invisible Women - Marmalade is the next frontier for feminism

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore. 

For nearly all of our 21 year existence, we were proudly committee-free. No big working groups making big decisions, or putting forward formalized, groupthink recommendations. No bureaucracy. But recently, a few sprung up. No longer. We’re turning things back over to the person (or people) who were distinctly hired to make those decisions. The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops. The responsibility for negotiating use restrictions and moral quandaries returns to me and David. A long-standing group of managers called “Small Council” will disband — when we need advice or counsel we’ll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large. Back to basics, back to individual responsibility, back to work.

…in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election […] it felt you couldn’t move for tweets, speeches and op-eds by (usually) white men decrying the ills of what they called ‘identity politics’. Ten days after Donald Trump’s victory, the New York Times published an article by Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, that criticised Clinton for ‘calling out explicitly to African American, Latino, LGBT and women voters’. This left out, he said, ‘the white working class’. Lilla presented Clinton’s ‘rhetoric of diversity’ as mutually exclusive with ‘a large vision’, linking this ‘narrow’ vision (clearly, Lilla has been reading his V. S. Naipaul) with what he felt he was witnessing with college students. Students today, he claimed, were so primed to focus on diversity that they ‘have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good’.

Two days after this was published, ex-Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was in Boston at a stop on his book tour84 explain- ing that ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ In Australia, Paul Kelly, editor of the Australian, described Trump’s victory as ‘a revolt against identity politics’, while over in the UK, Labour MP Richard Burgon tweeted that Trump’s inauguration was ‘what can happen when centre/left parties abandon transformation of economic system and rely on identity politics’.

The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins concluded the annus horribilis that was 2016 with a diatribe against ‘the identity apostles’, who had been ‘over-defensive’ of minorities, and thus killed off liberalism. ‘I have no tribe,’ he wrote. He could not ‘join the prevailing hysteria’. What he wanted was ‘to re-enact the glorious revolution of 1832’ – which resulted in the extension of the British franchise to a few extra hundred thousand men of property. Heady days, indeed.

These white men have in common the following opinions: that identity politics is only identity politics when it’s about race or sex; that race and sex have nothing to do with ‘wider’ issues like ‘the economy’; that it is ‘narrow’ to specifically address the concerns of female voters and voters of colour; and that working class means white working-class men. Incidentally, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016 election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median annual wage of $59,380.89 Compare this to the majority female 924,640-strong cleaning and housekeeper workforce, whose median annual income is $21,820.90 So who’s the real working class?

These white men also have in common that they are white men. And I labour this point because it is exactly their whiteness and maleness that caused them to seriously vocalise the logical absurdity that identities exist only for those who happen not to be white or male. When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.

Felix Mendelssohn published six of his sister Fanny Hensel’s pieces under his own name and in 2010 another manuscript previously thought to be his was proven to be Hensel’s. For years classical scholars argued that the Roman poet Sulpicia couldn’t possibly have written the verses signed with her name – they were too good, not to mention too smutty. Judith Leyster, one of the first Dutch women to be admitted to an artists’ guild, was renowned in her time, but after her death in 1660 she was erased, her work attributed to her husband. In 2017, new works by nineteenth-century artist Caroline Louisa Daly were discovered – they had been previously attributed to men, one of whom was not even an artist.

At the turn of the twentieth century, award-winning British engineer, physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton remarked that while errors overall are ‘notoriously hard to kill […] an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’. She was right. Textbooks still routinely name Thomas Hunt Morgan as the person who discovered that sex was determined by chromosomes rather than environment, despite the fact that it was Nettie Stevens’ experiments on mealworms that established this – and despite the existence of correspondence between them where Morgan writes to ask Stevens for details of her experiment. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery that the sun is predominantly composed of hydrogen is often credited to her male supervisor. Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of injustice is Rosalind Franklin, whose work (she had concluded via her X-ray experiments and unit cell measurements that DNA con- sisted of two chains and a phosphate backbone) led James Watson and Francis Crick (now Nobel Prize-winning household names) to ‘discover’ DNA.