The sisterhood is a feminist lie It's naive to assume women will always agree

An alternative way to describe at least a subset of this group might be “bunch of massive hypocrites”, for it includes self-described socialists like Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Nadia Whittome and Zarah Sultana, apparently delighted to have their faces prominently displayed next to cosmetics worth hundreds and handbags worth thousands. “Everyone knows how expensive things have gotten… prices, rents and mortgages have soared,” Sultana is recorded as saying with a straight face. And to the further amusement of leftist-baiters everywhere, 13 has since proved to be an unlucky number: in the period between photo shoot and publication, Sultana and fellow rebel Apsana Begum had the whip suspended for backing the SNP’s amendment to scrap the two-child benefit cap.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the infamous precedents of “Blair’s babes” and “Cameron’s cuties”, Vogue sub-editors have restrained themselves from offering a pithy moniker in the headline, sticking to the unmemorable “13 MPs set to redefine what power means in modern Britain”. Presumably this came as a relief to any anxious Labour staffer who remembers eye-catching headlines such as “Blair babe ex-Labour MP found guilty of threatening hotel staff with four-letter rant”, or “Police handed video recording of ‘Cameron cutie’ MP and her lover”.

Even The Telegraph and The Mail have seemed somewhat downbeat in their follow-up articles to the Vogue piece, eschewing the fairly obvious “Starmer’s stunners” and going for “Starmer’s sisterhood” instead. In doing so, they have replaced habitual images of rivalrous beauty competitions with visions of warm friendship between women, holding hands and air-punching together to the sound of some uplifting girlboss anthem. One wonders if they have ever met an MP. As this cohort ages and the inevitable splits and rows proliferate, the starry-eyed optimism is bound to look comical in retrospect.

But it is true that this way of labelling women feels like an interesting sea change, and it’s not just the absence of overt sexism. Having flatlined for two decades, “sisterhood” seems to be becoming a buzzword again more generally, turning up in other women’s magazines, album titles, and even non-satirically in the Daily Wire this week. Its presence is perhaps further proof of the PR boost that 10 years of transactivism — obsessively intent upon dismantling womanhood in favour of testicle-havers — has given to old-school feminist values.

Indeed, in recent months, a covert vibe shift towards specifically female concerns seems to be underway even in Stonewall strongholds, with The Guardian drawing attention to the scandalous numbers of women and girls in the UK murdered by men, building upon existing campaigns by radical feminists such as the Femicide Census. Elsewhere, Queen Camilla has taken up the cause of domestic violence and will be focusing on the issue in a new ITV documentary. And lesbians — named as such, rather than submerged in the rainbow soup as is their usual fate—- are also having a cultural moment, featuring heavily in fashion, films and music this summer. But welcome as these throwbacks to the Sixties and Seventies are, the concept of sisterhood should probably be left there: not just a bad fit for women MPs but for women everywhere, it seems.

Originally introduced as an aspirational metaphor of solidarity around which those fighting for the feminist cause could rally, and with the mantra “sisterhood is powerful” soon becoming popular, there were cracks in the oversimplified story from the start — as any woman who literally has, or is, a sister could have predicted. There were always disagreements about what this mantra meant. Was it a simple reminder of the alleged fact that all women had experiences of patriarchal oppression in common with one another? Or was it an exhortation to be specially caring and non-confrontational towards other women, in contrast to paradigmatically masculine behaviour, as commonly perceived? In practice, neither instruction made much sense.

Some “sisters” seemed distinctly more oppressed than others, and some barely seemed oppressed at all, yet the non-hierarchical metaphor made it hard to discuss that point without generating resentment and defensiveness. Perhaps that particular problem might have been resolved had all women in the feminist movement indeed been capable of being sisterly and well-disposed to one another: listening calmly and charitably to internal complaints, exerting self-control in response, and resolving conflict diplomatically. But quite a lot of them very definitely were not. Features of the “trashing” behaviour that came to wreck second-wave organisations were memorably recorded by Anselma dell’Olio and Jo Freeman in the Seventies: denouncements, character assassinations, purity spirals, success penalisation, ostentatious displays of high dudgeon, and all the rest of the familiar female arsenal were rife.  As Ti-Grace Atkinson put it, with suitable melodrama for a very melodramatic time: “Sisterhood is powerful: it kills sisters”.

Nothing has really changed in this respect. “The personal is political” goes the famous feminist saying, but it is also true vice versa. Wherever there is an attempt to build an activist movement for females, two factions which hate each other’s guts will be falling out under the guise of political difference. Each will be pretending they contribute nothing to the poisonous dynamic themselves, while anyone who points out the personal element will be huffily accused of sexist assumptions. As I write, a fresh bout of vicious hostilities has resumed in what feels like the Hundred Year Gender-Critical War; meanwhile even members of the Hegelian E-girl Council are at daggers drawn, apparently.

Though it’s tempting to echo Camille Paglia’s hypothesis that “women’s withering judgmentalism about other women may be subliminally sparked by a cruel, Darwinian imperative”, probably more relevant is the fact that the social imperative to treat 51% of the population as symbolic siblings is far too abstract an idea to be practical, and would be just as much of a stretch for men. At its root, the ideal of sisterhood requires that you treat yourself and other women impersonally, as morally interchangeable. Yet of course, in practice nobody can live this way — they can only pretend to. Or as Freeman put it: “The new values of the Movement said that every woman was a sister, every woman was acceptable. I clearly was not. Yet no one could admit that I was not acceptable without admitting that they were not being sisters. It was easier to deny the reality of my unacceptability.” In other words, enter gaslighting for days, stage left.

The presumed value of impersonality is also implicit in the Vogue photoshoot, with the facial expressions of the Labour MPs deliberately composed so no one in particular stands out. In a strange irony, visual images of sisterhood such as this are close to much more blatantly objectifying ways of depicting women: catwalks with identically thin, blank-faced models evenly spaced along them; Robert Palmer’s fantastically glamorous backing guitarists in the Eighties; pornographic gangbangs involving multiple female participants; Blair’s babes, even. In each case, the women are supposed to be swappable with others — that’s the whole point of the representation.

Yet whether imposed by the male gaze or as a supposedly gynocentric political imperative, treating every woman as if she is just as important as any other woman, but certainly no more so, is impossible — at least, when that woman is you, or your friends, or indeed your enemies. In blood-related families, biological sisters tend to fight hard for differentiation from one other. Victorian literature was always dramatising these struggles, in works like Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. There is no reason to think that things should be any different writ large.

Utilitarianism also has a version of the imperative to sisterhood — “every man to count for one, nobody for more than one” — and that didn’t go so well either. Christianity can only just about pull off something similar as a guiding ideal because it is backed with an elaborate spiritual metaphysics that both feminism and utilitarianism lack.

Whatever feminism turns out to be in the secular age, then, it can’t be about sisterhood on an industrial scale. It just doesn’t work, and it would be a relief all round if we could admit it. It’s probably enough to act only in the name of the group of women you really care about, and not worry about the others. Which is, I predict, exactly what the new intake of Labour women MPs will be doing once the cameras have stopped clicking.

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Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist and a co-director of The Lesbian Project.

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