People love to declare the death of the women’s movement, pointing to the ‘failure’ of #MeToo or the Epstein files, but don’t give up the fight just yet, writes Rebecca Solnit

Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary. I’ve lived through dozens of them over the decades, and there’s been a fresh flurry over the past few years. These death announcements are mostly based on two dubious assumptions. One is that we’re at the end of the story, the point at which a verdict can be rendered and a moral extracted. In this version, 60 years on from the great 1960s surge of feminism, the process should be over, and if feminism has not won, surely it has lost. In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy entrenched in law, culture, social arrangements and economics could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime.

The other assumption is that one event can be a weathervane, a measuring stick, for the failure of feminism. Three popular recent candidates are the overturning of Roe v Wade in June 2022, #MeToo, and the Epstein files. Let’s first remember that the US is not the whole world. There have, for example, been countless obituary writers proclaiming that #MeToo is over or failed, and I’m not sure what that is based on – the assumption that all sexual abuse should have ended and, if not, feminism of the #MeToo subcategory did not succeed? Is any other human rights movement measured by such criteria? Did anyone think the civil rights movement should be judged by whether it terminated all racism for ever? The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved.

People love to declare the death of the women’s movement, pointing to the ‘failure’ of #MeToo or the Epstein files, but don’t give up the fight just yet, writes Rebecca Solnit

Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary. I’ve lived through dozens of them over the decades, and there’s been a fresh flurry over the past few years. These death announcements are mostly based on two dubious assumptions. One is that we’re at the end of the story, the point at which a verdict can be rendered and a moral extracted. In this version, 60 years on from the great 1960s surge of feminism, the process should be over, and if feminism has not won, surely it has lost. In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy entrenched in law, culture, social arrangements and economics could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime.

The other assumption is that one event can be a weathervane, a measuring stick, for the failure of feminism. Three popular recent candidates are the overturning of Roe v Wade in June 2022, #MeToo, and the Epstein files. Let’s first remember that the US is not the whole world. There have, for example, been countless obituary writers proclaiming that #MeToo is over or failed, and I’m not sure what that is based on – the assumption that all sexual abuse should have ended and, if not, feminism of the #MeToo subcategory did not succeed? Is any other human rights movement measured by such criteria? Did anyone think the civil rights movement should be judged by whether it terminated all racism for ever? The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved.

People love to declare the death of the women’s movement, pointing to the ‘failure’ of #MeToo or the Epstein files, but don’t give up the fight just yet, writes Rebecca Solnit

Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary. I’ve lived through dozens of them over the decades, and there’s been a fresh flurry over the past few years. These death announcements are mostly based on two dubious assumptions. One is that we’re at the end of the story, the point at which a verdict can be rendered and a moral extracted. In this version, 60 years on from the great 1960s surge of feminism, the process should be over, and if feminism has not won, surely it has lost. In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy entrenched in law, culture, social arrangements and economics could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime.

The other assumption is that one event can be a weathervane, a measuring stick, for the failure of feminism. Three popular recent candidates are the overturning of Roe v Wade in June 2022, #MeToo, and the Epstein files. Let’s first remember that the US is not the whole world. There have, for example, been countless obituary writers proclaiming that #MeToo is over or failed, and I’m not sure what that is based on – the assumption that all sexual abuse should have ended and, if not, feminism of the #MeToo subcategory did not succeed? Is any other human rights movement measured by such criteria? Did anyone think the civil rights movement should be judged by whether it terminated all racism for ever? The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved.