Flickr. Labour Party. Some rights reserved.In most respects, everyone agrees that Jeremy Corbyn’s elevation to the leadership of the Labour Party is little short of revolutionary. His faction within the party had long been relegated to Labour’s dustiest oubliette; his candidacy was a sop to ideological diversity that caught fire like Katniss Everdeen.
However, there has been one segment of opinion that deems Corbyn’s election, and that of the new deputy leader and London mayoral candidate, to be a throwback. Feminist commentators have claimed that the election results reveal a misogyny or hostility to female leadership within the Labour Party. Every female candidate for the three major offices up for nomination was defeated. To add insult to injury, Corbyn named men to shadow all four of the “great offices of state” – the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the home secretary, the justice secretary and the foreign secretary. Corbyn did name a female-majority shadow cabinet – a first – but as several of the women named are in relatively junior positions, Corbyn and his party now face cries of sexism, including some from within the parliamentary party. Are they justified?
It’s not my place to tell British women that they don’t experience sexism or aren’t fit to identify it. I am well aware that this essay can appear to be noxious mansplaining. That said, I don’t think Corbyn’s victory – or the defeats of his female opponents, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall – reflect an institutional sexism within the Labour Party or Corbyn voters. Although almost no organization in any society is free of structural sexism, Labour’s record on feminist issues is unusually good for any western political party. One can accuse Labour of many things – from a lack of revolutionary fervor to fiscal incompetence – but it is difficult to accuse it of being hostile to feminism.
