“Enola Holmes strikes again!” exclaims the trailer for Millie Bobby Brown’s new Netflix film about Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister – a peppy Victorian sleuth with attitude, who makes continual Fleabag-style asides to camera. “Strikes again!” refers not only to its status as a sequel, but to its setting. The film takes place during the 1888 matchgirls’ strike, when more than a thousand women and girls walked out of the Bryant & May factory in east London in protest against toxic working conditions – 14-hour days, poverty wages and the disease of “phossy jaw”, caused by managerial indifference to health and safety. In one scene, strike leader Sarah Chapman stands on a table, shouting: “It’s time for us to refuse to work. It’s time to tell them – NO!”
It is still both unexpected and heartening to see striking women on screen (unless, of course, you are the Telegraph’s film critic, who gave this otherwise well-reviewed film a paltry 2/5 stars). The film’s representation of women protesting against material conditions is also a sign of the times. After several decades of being pushed aside, marginalised and positioned as unfashionable or even embarrassing, this form of feminism, which tackles gendered and economic exploitation at the same time, is resurgent. Forthright female general secretaries are steering the action of several unions, including Christina McAnea at Unison, Jo Grady at UCU and Sharon Graham of Unite. As Frances O’Grady, outgoing leader of the TUC, puts it, this winter’s wave of strike action is being powered by “a generation of women who are saying ‘enough is enough’”. There is renewed anger at gendered pay gaps and marches in the street for affordable childcare. Nursery costs in the UK are some of the most expensive in Europe, while nursery workers themselves are paid a pittance.
The rekindling of left feminism in recent years has not only happened in Britain. You can see it in the global grassroots action of the Women’s Strike, and in how women such as Ada Colau in Barcelona have played a pivotal role in the reinvention of local democracy. You can see it in the popular charge of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad” of US democratic socialists. You can see it through the massive joint actions to stop violence against women and debt across Latin America in the #NiUnaMenos movement, which has seen feminists pour on to the street under the slogan “we want ourselves alive and debt free!”.
Such forms of political action by feminists on the left – or what has been dubbed “feminism for the 99%” – have escalated since the global financial crash of 2008. A prominent example has been Sisters Uncut’s spectacular protests (such as colouring the fountains at Trafalgar Square red) against the UK government’s austerity cuts to domestic violence support services. These actions are reactions to the savage inequality that has stemmed from the government’s pursuit of policies that favoured the rich and the financial services industry. Austerity and spending cuts have entrenched gender inequality: forcing women to undertake more unpaid care work, for instance.
This form of feminism is fundamentally different to that which encourages women to simply “lean in” and climb the corporate ladder – while leaving the economic dynamics that underpin that corporate ladder untouched. There is now widespread dissatisfaction with the “girlboss” model of feminism. A slew of recent memes and articles have pronounced the “end of the girlboss” and declared that the “girlboss is leaving the building”, criticising its glossy individualism for being unrealistic, infantilising and exploitative.
Feminism on the left spans a broad spectrum – socialist, communist, social democratic. Today, as in the past, there are plenty of differences and disagreements, sometimes useful, sometimes not. Over the past few years I have conducted interviews with a range of leftwing feminist academics of different backgrounds, generations and political allegiances. What unites them is an understanding that sexist oppression and economic exploitation are interrelated. Contemporary society relentlessly incites us to think of ourselves as atomised individuals who should primarily compete, rather than cooperate, with each other. Left feminism works against such lonely and divisive ways of being. In its many different forms, it argues for the redistribution of wealth.
Historically, this movement has been concerned not only with the exploitation bound up in paid labour but also with domestic inequalities: with thinking about both those things together, often through what is called “social reproduction”. This concept helps identify how the economy has historically depended on the free labour of housework and child-rearing to sustain itself. Looking at social reproduction in its broadest sense – at the role of housewives, nannies, maids, cleaners, grandparents, au pairs – also means that left feminism always necessarily needs to be international and anti-racist, as only too often it is badly paid migrant women who do most of the “dirty work”.
In part what is striking and heartening about Enola Holmes 2 is the ease and vigour with which a left feminist plotline is made central to the film. A significant slice of feminist history from the left is brought to life, made sense of and cheered on. It resonates with the different but connected politics of the present, when roles historically designated as “women’s work” remain undervalued and underpaid, and when many on the right seem only too keen to return to a moment before the welfare state and labour regulation.
There are many more historical feminist moments of this variety that are ripe for mainstream dramatisation, particularly the “strikers in saris” at the Grunwick photo-processing labs in 1970s Willesden, London, led by Jayaben Desai, which was both a pivotal political moment and a challenge to the overwhelmingly white trade union movement. And at the same time, if there are many feminist political campaigns and picket lines to dramatise from the past, there are now an equally large number to support, and to rally round, in the present.
Jo Littler is a professor of social analysis and cultural politics at City, University of London, and the author of Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and the Political, published in March 2023
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