Anarcha-Feminism
Anarcha-feminism (Anarchist feminism) – a current of feminist and anarchist thought that combines the feminist critique of patriarchy and gender hierarchy with the anarchist critique of domination, coercive authority, the state, and other hierarchical social relations. Anarcha-feminism holds that gender liberation cannot be achieved by replacing one form of domination with another and therefore seeks social relations based on autonomy, equality, voluntary association, and the dismantling of oppressive hierarchies (Brown, 1993; Kowal, 2019).
Anarcha-feminist analysis extends beyond formal political institutions to interpersonal, familial, sexual, economic, and cultural relations. It examines how patriarchal power may operate through marriage, the family, gender roles, sexuality, reproductive control, the gendered division of labour, education, employment, and political organization. From this perspective, domination in intimate and everyday life is inseparable from broader structures of political and social power.
The intellectual roots of anarcha-feminism can be traced to anarchist women and feminist-oriented anarchist thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, Louise Michel, and Charlotte Wilson. Their writings and activism challenged sexual double standards, compulsory or economically coercive forms of marriage, restrictions on women’s autonomy, and gendered divisions of social and domestic labour (Thomas, 2002; Kowal, 2019). Emma Goldman, for example, developed a sustained critique of marriage as a social and economic institution that could restrict women’s freedom and autonomy (Goldman, 1911).
During the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s, anarcha-feminism acquired a more explicit theoretical and organizational form. Writers such as Peggy Kornegger and Carol Ehrlich emphasized affinities between radical feminism and anarchism, particularly their critiques of hierarchy, domination, authoritarianism, and centralized power. They argued that feminist liberation required not merely women’s access to existing structures of power but a transformation of the hierarchical social relations through which domination itself is reproduced (Kowal, 2019).
Anarcha-feminism does not constitute a single homogeneous doctrine. Its various strands have drawn on anarchist communism, individualist anarchism, anti-authoritarian socialism, radical feminism, and other traditions. What unites them is the view that patriarchal domination should be analysed together with other hierarchical structures rather than reduced solely to state power or treated as a separate “women’s issue.”
From an anarcha-feminist perspective, therefore, the transformation of gender relations involves not only challenging discriminatory laws and institutions but also questioning hierarchical forms of authority in everyday life, intimate relationships, labour, political organization, and the production of social norms.
See also: Radical Feminism, Patriarchy, Gender Hierarchy, Gender Roles.
References
Brown, L. S. (1993). The politics of individualism: Liberalism, liberal feminism and anarchism. Black Rose Books.
Goldman, E. (1911). Anarchism and other essays (2nd rev. ed.). Mother Earth Publishing Association.
Kowal, D. M. (2019). Anarcha-feminism. In C. Levy & M. S. Adams (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of anarchism (pp. 265–279). Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_15
Thomas, M. (2002). Anarcho-feminism in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, 1880–1914. International Review of Social History, 47(1), 1–31. doi:10.1017/S0020859001000463
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