Professional feminists: Challenging local government inside out

Abstract

Gender equality work in local government carried out during the 1980s presents a valuable site to explore the interaction between professional and feminist working. In the history of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) and feminist organizing more broadly in the UK, professional working has often been positioned as antithetical to feminist working, and relatively little scholarship has examined the interface between the two. This article argues that the individuals involved should be considered ‘professional feminists’ as opposed to ‘femocrats’, drawing from across feminist, social movement and organizational theory, and interviews carried out in 2011 and archival texts from three UK councils. It also suggests their work (undertaken between the beginning of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s) serves to blur the boundaries usually marked between social movement and state. This contributes to the existing literature by exploring the specific understandings and practices put to work by those working on gender equality professionally, but not in an elected capacity, within local government, and how their work can be positioned in relation to feminist organizing more broadly.

Introduction: gender experts and gender expertise

“…A number of authors who have also worked as gender experts have called for more nuanced analysis and for taking seriously the experiences of gender experts in order to highlight the variety of gender expertise and to tease out the tensions and complexities of their work in sometimes inhospitable institutional contexts (Bustelo et al, 2016;Ferguson, 2014;Harcourt, 2015;Hertzog, 2011;Jauhola, 2013b;Mukhopadhyay, 2014). In national contexts, Australian writers coined the term femocrats to describe already in the 1990s the ambiguous positioning of these new experts between activism and technocracy (Eisenstein, 1996;Yeatman, 1990), and in the UK context Ross (2018) has proposed the figure of the 'professional feminist'. In the international arena, Ferguson draws on first-hand experience as a gender expert to explore what it means to work within the 'business case for gender equality' framework (Ferguson 2014, see also Ferguson this issue).…”