A review of Enemy Feminism: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis (Haymarket, 2025), £14.99
I finished reading Enemy Feminism on the day the British Supreme Court ruled that equal rights legislation applied exclusively to biological sex. Watching “feminists” celebrate this attack on trans and non-binary people transformed my reading from an engaging and polemical history into a vital resource. Sophie Lewis demonstrates how such reactionary feminism has a long history. We have seen anti-anti-racist feminists; imperialist feminists; eugenicist feminists; fascist feminists—and that’s before you get to girlbosses, anti-choice feminists and, of course, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs).
As Lewis acknowledges, there is already an extensive body of work that has decolonised western feminism and its assumption of whiteness. This literature demonstrates how “upper and middle-class ladies participated feministly in racial domination on a planetary scale”.1 Lewis’s contribution lies in her retrieval of the histories of reactionary women, and how she identifies their legacies in contemporary reactionary movements. In today’s TERF rhetoric, Lewis observes “two centuries of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ feminist participation in eugenicist colonial efforts to clean up messy gender (and prostitution) in colonies like British India, where there were substantial populations of non-cisgender indigenes”. For Lewis, feminist transphobia is inextricably connected to feminist imperialism.2
Lewis’s book is awash with fascinating history, but the context made a chapter that focuses on the “Adult Human Female” stand out as a deeply satisfying riposte to feminist transphobes. The phrase “Adult Human Female” was popularised by Posie Parker in 2018. She argues, “most women are not feminists and don’t want to hear about misogyny or patriarchy, to protect women’s rights, we must abandon feminism”.3 Before Parker made herself toxic, she won a big audience among feminists. Now her rallies are attended by fascists giving Nazi salutes. Predictably, transphobic children’s author JK Rowling did not condemn these fascists—she condemned those protesting against them who poured tomato juice on Parker.4
One distinct strand of “reactionary feminism” connects opposition to abortion rights with opposition to trans rights. The public intellectual Mary Harrington, author of The Feminist Case Against Progress (Swift Press; 2023), does not like abortion and contraception because they turn women into men—carefree and aggressive. Harrington really hates what she calls “transgenderism”, which she sees, like abortion, as an expression of an anti-naturalist hatred for the female body. Harrington is on a crusade for sex-based rights against trans life that, she claims, represents an existential threat to civilisation. Harrington advises people to “carry a big stick”, she advises.5
Harrington is one of many middle-class feminists sucked into the vortex of transphobia since 2018. JK Rowling, Julie Bindell, Kathleen Stock, Nina Power, Julie Birchall have all produced widely reviewed diatribes against trans rights. Another strand of transphobic feminism coalesced around the ex-Catholic professor of philosophy at Boston College, Mary Daly. Daly argues that while trans women have no penises, “their whole mind is still a penis. Their eyes are penises, their hands are penises”.6 Among Daly’s students was the arch transphobe Janice Raymond, whose fountainhead of transphobia, The Transexual Empire (The Women’s Press; 1979), has been hugely influential. Raymond successfully campaigned to get trans healthcare excluded from insurance policies in the United States and writes that transexuals are not women—they are “deviant males” and “masochists”.7 Biological determinism is the core belief that animates these currents of transphobic feminism. Women’s biology means that a person is oppressed; men’s biology means a person is an oppressor. As Lewis rightly comments, biological sex is not the cause of women’s oppression: “It is pressed into service as a concept rationalising oppression”.8 Marxists and socialist feminists have long rejected biological determinist approaches to understanding women’s oppression, pointing instead to the role of the privatised family in generating and perpetuating women’s oppression.
Transphobia has never been widely accepted in the women’s movement. Back in 1973, the issue came up at the massive West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles. Robin Morgan, author of Sisterhood is Powerful (Vintage Books; 1970), used her speech to verbally assault Beth Elliot, a well-respected trans woman, lesbian and activist. Attendees protected Elliot from the physical attacks instigated by Morgan, and there was an outcry against her.9 Lewis relates this incident to a long tradition of feminists refusing to accept as sisters the wrong sort of women—Irish women, black women, Muslim women, sexually deviant women, drunk women, sex workers.
The TERF’s central claim, “that they are the real victims of marginalisation— is a classic settler colonial gesture, wherein victim and oppressor get reversed”.10 Lewis points out how closely the TERFs now align with Trumpian politics. In May 2023, Fox News host Megyn Kelly posted a photo of herself wearing a baseball hat from the British “Adult Human Female” store, with the slogan, “Make Women Female Again”.11 Knowing the history can strengthen opposition to today’s iterations of reactionary feminism.
Lewis’s book is not without its flaws. She begins her study with Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin; 2004 [1792]). Lewis is critical of Wollstonecraft’s use of the slavery motif to claim sympathy for women’s plight. The use of slavery was widespread among radical movements up until the 1840s, when Chartists claimed the slavery of British workers could be compared to that of enslaved people. The deployment of the slavery motif was an acknowledgement of the power of the abolitionist movement. It did, of course, underplay the horrific conditions endured by enslaved people, as many historians have rightly pointed out.
Lucy Delap has challenged the idea that feminism began exclusively among the middle-class women of Western Europe, pointing to feminist campaigns in Sierra Leone in 1792 and in Egypt in 1799.12 Wollstonecraft was part of a network of female authors and activists that included Anne Plumtree, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays and Amelia Opie.13 Wollstonecraft was a contradictory figure because she was immersed in a bourgeois revolution. She wanted society reformed, relationships made rational and democratic rights to be extended to the poor, to women and to enslaved people. Yet, this vision was limited by the priorities of the emerging capitalist system. Wollstonecraft embraced the idea of western superiority over “eastern barbarism”, lambasting infantilised women as “only fit for the seraglio”.14 It is true that “Wollstonecraft’s heirs imagined themselves universalists, but painted pictures of black and brown women’s progress that looked very different from their hopes for themselves”.15 However, this is a rather one-sided account of Wollstonecraft’s contribution to the creation of the women’s movement.
I had similar misgivings about Lewis’s account of The English Women’s Journal. The Journal, Lewis argues, created a female version of “John Bull”. This “Jane Bull” was a vigorous, imperialist, ethno-nationalist young woman fearing miscegenation. For Lewis, the journal’s content shows how, “Rather in a manner we’ve seen echoed time again in the voting patterns of affluent white women in the west, racial and colonial class loyalties firmly trumped sisterhood”.16 The English Women’s Journal has been the staple of histories of British women’s rights campaigning, the first publication produced by women, some of whom were lesbians and some working-class women. It is right that such influential organisations are scrutinised for their compliance with colonial projects, but it should also be acknowledged that there were contradictory ideas in play.
Lewis is on firmer ground when she exposes how the dominant current within the US women’s suffrage campaigners embraced racism. Margaret Hardenbroeck is now acclaimed as “The first woman in America to build herself an Empire”.17 Hardenbroeck was born in 1637. She inherited a fortune from her first husband, which she spent on buying a fleet of ships, which added to her fortune through the trade in enslaved people. Rebecca Latimer Felton was the first women senator in the US. However, she was also a fanatical supporter of lynching. At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, women renewed their campaign for the vote but lost the vote in state after state. In 1868, the leading women’s suffrage organisation, the American Equal Rights Association, split over what attitude to adopt to the 15th Amendment, which gave the vote to black men.18 One of the most prominent suffrage campaigners, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wrote an infamous letter to the New York Standard expressing her disgust at the very idea that educated “Anglo-Saxon” females who campaigned for abolition of slavery were now being asked to “stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first”.19 There were also currents within the US women’s movement that countered this racism with solidarity, friendship and unity. Cady Stanton, however, decided to prioritise challenging institutionalised politics excluding women over creating solidarity between women and black people.
Women were involved in the racism of the colonial project. In 1891, when “White Queen” May French Sheldon set off from New York for a safari in East Africa, she took a tiara and a ball gown with her. She took up the “white woman’s burden” to civilise the locals. However, when Sheldon was tasked with uncovering the appalling atrocities committed by the colonialists in the Belgian Congo, she could find nothing to report.20 Lewis connects this colonial feminism with today’s “Lionesses of the Desert”: the women soldiers of the Israel Defense Force. These self-styled enlightened rape-avengers who pretend they are engaged in the “righteous struggle against sexual barbarism of Hamas, have proved to be indispensable in smearing the Palestine movement as anti-Semitic and anti-feminist”.21
More problematic is the example of Josephine Butler. In 1869, Butler began her highly effective campaign against the criminalisation of working-class women’s bodies and sexuality. The Contagious Diseases Acts aimed to prevent the spread of venereal disease in the British army and navy. It gave police forces in designated towns the right to grab women off the streets and force them to endure painful and humiliating vaginal examinations. Any women showing signs of venereal disease were incarcerated in lock hospitals or workhouses. Butler opened her home to sick and dying sex workers. Her campaign was a crucial factor in the repeal of the acts in 1886. Butler then began to campaign for the repeal of identical laws in British India.22
Butler’s anti-state campaign focused on the role of the cops, judges, politicians, and doctors in criminalising women. This could easily be diverted towards male vice and any sexual variation and a mass campaign against s0-called “white slavery”.23 Perhaps, Lewis ponders, Butler should not be held responsible for the trajectory of the campaign she began. However, by referring to her campaign as a “new abolitionism”, Butler has contributed to the confusion about what abolition really means.24 To realise true abolition, Butler would have had to stoke the world’s appetite for a revolution in the gender division of labour.25 I am all in favour of stoking the fires of revolution, but to insist that women involved in militant campaigns for reform should be evaluated through this measure is setting the bar a bit high.
Frances Willard was one of the women who came to prominences as a purity campaigner and advocate of prohibition. Willard combined her ardent support for female suffrage with hatred of the “alien illiterates that rule our cities today. The saloon is their palace”.26 In London, Willard gave an interview to the New York Voice in which she described “coloured” men as a swarm threatening the purity of southern white women.27 Black anti-lynching activist and suffragist Ida B Wells responded affectively. However, Willard’s Women’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTM) insisted at its 1894 convention that it was white women, not black men, who were in peril. The prohibition of alcohol movement became an instrument of white nationalism and created the foundations of a legacy of carceral feminism which continues to fester today.
Lulu Markwell was a longstanding member of the WCTM—and she also became the first imperial commander of the women’s Ku Klux Klan. Alma Bridwell White was a passionate advocate of women’s suffrage and gender equality and became the first ordained woman bishop in the US as part of the Methodist movement. She was also a fervent supporter of the KKK, praising “our heroes in white robes”.28 Her support helped to swell the ranks of the KKK to around 6 million by the late 1920s. Today, the descendants of the KKK feminists are active in the Christian nationalist “save our children” movement in the US and in groups such as EmPOWERed, a feminist gun advocacy group. The slogan, “Gun rights are women’s rights” draws on the legacies of lynching as a protection against rape.29
Among the British Blackshirt feminists were some prominent erstwhile suffragettes. Mary Richardson, notorious for slashing the Diego Velazquez painting The Rokeby Venus spent the 1920s knocking around with the Labour Party before joining Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists in 1933. Two years later, Richardson was expelled for demanding women’s rights too vociferously. Some women saw fascism as a vehicle for winning their rights as women, for providing protection from the threat of communism and they embraced antisemitic and racist ideas. While some ex-suffragettes embraced fascism, others organised against it. Sylvia Pankhurst addressed an anti-fascist rally in Trafalgar square in June 1934, just after 10,000 rallied for Moseley at Olympia, and the Daily Mail declared “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”.30
Feminist campaigns against pornography in the 1970s and 1980s revived some of the puritanical, repressive ideas of the movement against sex work and white slavery. It also incubated biological deterministic views that male violence was rooted in the presence of the penis. These reactionary ideas coalesced around Women Against Pornography (WAP) and writers including Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin. WAP created a pipeline that led women away from radical ideas towards hostility to sexual freedom and a reconciliation with the state as the main tool for eradicating pornography.31
Lewis draws attention to the rise and rise of the unkillable girlboss, and the idea of “trickle down feminism”, so closely associated with figures like Sheryl Sandberg, who advised women to stick on their lippy, stop moaning about inequality and shoulder their way into the boardroom. For Lewis, the girlboss cultural trend is “merely the cult of the entrepreneur, cynically using the latest signifiers of un-privilege (intersectional and girl in place of the working women of yesteryear) to anoint profit seeking with the elixir of progressivism”.32 They did not predict how quickly that even this veneer of progressivism would be dumped by CEOs reborn as Trump supporters.
Closely associated with the girlbosses are the Femonationalists, a term coined by Sarah Farris to describe how feminist aspirations are coopted by nationalists and neoliberals in anti-Islam and anti-immigrant campaigns.33 Femonationalism intensified following the so-called War on Terror in the early 2000s, when women, including Cherie Blair and Laura Bush, declared that the war on Afghanistan is a war for women’s liberation. One of Femonationalism’s most vehement advocates is the Islamophobic commentator Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali sought asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, where she was elected as a minister for the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom in 2003. She then made an anti-Islam film, moved to the US and became a right-wing public intellectual. Femonationalism connects commentators such as Ali with politicians such as Priti Patel, Marine Le Pen and Alice Schwarzer. They all position themselves as defending women from young men of “North African appearance”, the perpetrators of a “Muslim sexism” who are demonised as “rapefugees”, the idea that asylum seeking rapists are surging into overly-compassionate Western countries.34
Anti-choice women have also appropriated the language of feminism. They talk of how “girl power begins at conception”, how “both lives matter” and their pro-life intifada against the “abortion industrial complex”.35 Some pro-life, or forced life, feminists, as Lewis rightly calls them, claim a maternalistic heritage dating back to the 19th century, while others pose as the inheritors of the 1960s civil rights movement. Feminists for Life coordinates calls to “revolutionise your campus” in the name of life.36 They promote their anti-choice activism as the “feminism of care”, and they have access to a worrying amount of money and airtime in the media.
Lewis is right to stress the importance of understanding the complicities of feminism with reactionary politics. However, not all the feminists she marshalled for her argument deserve to be described as reactionary. Lewis describes the British feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy as a purity campaigner or charitable grandee, repulsed by youthful sexuality.37 Wolstenholme lived with her lover, Benjamin Elmy, until she became pregnant, then gave into her friends’ pleas and married him in 1874. Sandra Holton Stanley argues that radical figures such as Elizabeth Wolstenholme were marginalised and frowned upon by the official leaders of the suffrage movement.38 Nor it is entirely accurate to describe the suffragette organisation the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) as “a profoundly autocratic single-issue militia” built around a “paramilitary cult of the personality” always susceptible to the pull of empire.39 The political trajectory of the WSPU was highly contested and it incubated a range of political ideas. After the First World War, several prominent former members of WSPU became communists, including Sylvia Pankhurst, Dora Montefiore and Charlotte Despard.
Lewis’s book is, perhaps, too short on explanation as to why these women were pulled towards reactionary feminisms and the class and political dynamics that interact with experiences of oppression, pitting one group of oppressed people against another. Her approach is to explore enemy feminisms through the stories of individual women. This method is engaging, but it also risks reducing reactionary political ideas to the bad choices made by individual women, rather than exploring why women thought they could advance their rights through racist, imperialist and fascist movements. Moreover, Lewis is a little short on drawing theoretical conclusions from their histories. All these feminists experienced oppression but drew radically different conclusions. The strategies they adopted led away from united and potentially powerful resistance to oppression and were contested by demands for unity and solidarity. However, Lewis’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of the continuities between the reactionary feminisms of the past and those we confront today, which help us to reject the “feminism of fear”. As she explains, “What we need now is a bestiary of enemy feminism, to jolt us into understanding that a woman’s cry for women’s power is sometimes part and parcel of the oppressor’s programme”.40
Judy Cox has a PhD for research on the role played by women in the radical movements of the 19th century.
1 Lewis, 2025, p22.
2 Lewis, 2025, p19.
3 Lewis, 2025, p531.
4 Lewis, 2025, p533.
5 Lewis, 2025, p525.
6 Lewis, 2025, p550.
7 Lewis, 2025, p557.
8 Lewis, 2025, p560.
9 Lewis, 2025, p540.
10 Lewis, 2025, p548.
11 Lewis, 2025, p529.
12 Delap, 2020, p41.
13 Sloane, 2022, ch2
14 Lewis, 2025, p71.
15 Lewis, 2025, p73.
16 Lewis, 2025, p86.
17 Lewis, 2025, p90.
18 Lewis, 2025, p109.
19 Lewis, 2025, p105.
20 Lewis, 2025, p145.
21 Lewis, 2025, p149.
22 Lewis, 2025, p153.
23 Lewis, 2025, p173.
24 Lewis, 2025, p156.
25 Lewis, 2025, p156.
26 Lewis, 2025, p175.
27 Lewis, 2025, p80.
28 Lewis, 2025, p201.
29 Lewis, 2025, p232.
30 Lewis, 2025, p274.
31 McGregor, 1989.
32 Lewis 2025, p386.
33 Lewis, 2025, p440.
34 Lewis, 2025, p459.
35 Lewis, 2025, p475.
36 Lewis, 2025, p479.
37 Lewis, 2025, p190.
38 Holton Stanley, 1996, pp8-9.
39 Lewis, 2025, p245.
40 Lewis, 2025, p55.
References
History (Pelican).