Sophie Lewis’s new book insists that some strands of feminism are our enemies
In Enemy Feminisms, Sophie Lewis exposes how certain strains of feminism have betrayed the struggle against women’s oppression. Across twelve chapters, she traces feminisms that aligned not with the oppressed, but with colonial empire, capitalist order and the carceral state.
This book compels us to confront how the same logics still drive Islamophobia, militarism, and attacks on trans+ people. Crucially, Lewis insists that we must name these tendencies—and be willing to draw lines. Some feminisms are enemies, and we must treat them as such.
Her analysis is organised through the lens of abolitionist politics. Lewis sharply critiques the feminisms that have propped up or operated within the very systems we seek to overthrow, evidencing their inherent classism and racism.
She begins with Mary Wollstonecraft, long celebrated as a feminist icon, but whose writing reveals classism and racism. Wollstonecraft framed upper class womanhood as a rational, neutral norm reinforcing bourgeois superiority. While advocating for autonomy and education, Wollstonecraft likened Englishwomen’s marital conditions to enslavement.
This erases the violence of empire and excludes working class and racialised women from her vision of emancipation.
Lewis also highlights Jane Bull, a female equivalent of the symbol of John Bull. Jane Bull figures waged campaigns against sex work and stoked fears of “white slavery” which criminalised working class and migrant women, ultimately reinforcing a racist, imperialist order.
This moral panic allowed for the development of what Lewis terms “policewoman” feminism. This is exemplified by Mary Sophia Allen—an ex-suffragette who helped police “immoral” women in Grantham in partnership with the state. Allen also developed ties to the British Union of Fascists.
Lewis writes on May French Sheldon, a wealthy American feminist who “travelled solo” in East Africa (carried by 150 porters). Lewis explains how Sheldon reported that Africans begged her to rule over them. Lewis parallels Sheldon’s colonial feminism, of her purity at the “edge of civilisation”, to the Israeli Defense Force’s “lionesses of the desert” waging genocide in Gaza.
Such narratives rely on a consistent formula: white women as victims, black men as predators and the state as protector. We see these tropes in Britain manufactured panic over Muslim grooming gangs or the current lies about Hamas committing mass rape. They are recycled to justify imperial and racist violence.
Lewis goes on to trace the links between the temperance feminists such as Frances Willard involved with moralistic control over women’s behaviours, to the anti-pornography feminists of the 1970s who aligned with conservative moralism.
Lewis’s critique of trans-exclusionary radical feminists is all the more real after the Supreme Court’s ruling to interpret “sex” as “biological sex,” laying the groundwork for trans exclusion.
At the root of these enemy feminisms are proto fascist ideals of purity and biological destiny—ideals have historically excluded poor women, trans+ women, black women and sex workers.
Our politics must be rooted in material reality. As revolutionary socialists, we see gender roles as shaped by class relations. This analysis helps us chart a path grounded in solidarity, not exclusion.
We fight for a vision of change that stands with the most marginalised, not one that props up empire, police or capital. Too often, liberal feminisms masquerade as liberatory while serving the very systems we oppose. The working class, as the producer of profit under capitalism, holds the power to overthrow this order—and their struggle must confront all forms of oppression.
That means defending trans+ lives, supporting sex workers, opposing imperialist war and resisting racist borders. We cannot afford unity with enemy feminists. We must understand their origins, draw firm lines and organise against them.
- Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis is available at Bookmarks
