The revolutionary resurgence of
women-only spaces
Toronto co-working space Make Lemonade is what the phrase “You Got This” would look like if it came to life in the form of a 3,000-square-foot office. Walking in, the first thing I noticed about the space, which is geared toward both trans and cis women, as well as women-identified people, was a bulletin board covered in members’ business cards. I picked out one for a graphic designer who has created a product line and brand called Mantone in response to a certain other brand’s oft-irrelevant “colour of the year” picks; her business card was a dark green swatch in “wage gap.” Another card promoted a member’s company that makes “the first bra that adapts to your breast size,” available in more than ninety (!!!) sizes. I saw a business card that advertised a comprehensive online mental health service called Inkblot, which offers video counselling to clients. Many other cards belonged to writers, social media and brand consultants, women offering diverse beauty and fitness services, and business coaches.
A person could not even pee without being assured of their excellence. Inside the washroom, members had covered the walls, mirrors, and stalls with handwritten inspirational messages to each other. Be True to U. No Bad Vibes. Love Yourself The Most. You are Beautiful. You are So Worthy. Seek Magic. Life is Tough and So Are You. It’s Okay To Pivot. Who Run the World? Girls. Little hearts and smiley faces popped through where there was no room left to write. If it weren’t for all the colleagues and friends who’d told me stories over the years about escaping their office to cry in the bathroom, it might have almost seemed cheesy. As it stood, it felt more like a refuge. Women sat at both the shared tables and individual desks, typing, scrolling, and softly chatting to each other. Looping back to the front of the space, I saw a soft-pink wall filled with another affirming motto, this one giant-sized: “She believes she can so she does.”
“We’re changing that,” Rachel Kelly, the space’s founder and owner, told me. On reflection, she’d come to see the phrase as exclusive. “Our wall will become, ‘We believe we can so we do.’” Make Lemonade, she stressed, is advertised as women-identified, a description that is meant to be inclusive of both trans women and non-binary people. With steaming mugs of tea from a woman-owned social enterprise in hand, Kelly and I settled into the space’s indoor patio — a whole area outfitted in AstroTurf, designed to mimic a chic outdoors — as she explained to me how she devised Make Lemonade. She had been working as a freelancer in her mid-twenties and life had handed her a lemon when a full-time, in-office job suddenly fell through, days before she was supposed to start. Tired of working alone in coffee shops, she started studying communities and spaces from around the world that she wished were her communities and spaces. She posted the images on Instagram, created polls on Facebook. What she was really doing, bit by bit, she said, was creating a new version of reality, realizing it could be possible, and sharing that vision with everybody else. She knew that she wanted a bricks-and-mortar place for women to make the same sort of connections in real life that she saw happening online. So she built one.
Make Lemonade opened its doors in fall 2017, right as #MeToo was breaking the internet. Experiencing the collective power of the movement, as well as the feminist furor over 2017 in general, combined with being around so many other amazing women, pushed Kelly’s feminism in a new direction. She went from thinking Let’s figure out a way to work within the system to Let’s disrupt the system. For the longest time, she said, she had focused on having the right chairs, achieving the perfect lighting, getting fast Wi-Fi — all good things, but not, she realized, what actually made people come to the space. The epiphany: members came to Make Lemonade because they, like her, thought it felt like the future. Just a little taste of it: a place where women could form inclusive, encouraging communities in which they would feel welcome. The point wasn’t to sit around and diss men, as some might assume, or to have 24/7 conversations about feminism (obviously while simultaneously burning one’s bra and making an altar to Supreme Being Gloria Steinem). The point was to not be part of the game at all. “There’s a lot of healing that goes on in here,” said Kelly. “Just by coming in here, you’re choosing to have a space for you, to come in and do your work in a supported way.”
We chatted a bit more about the idea of having a space “for you.” While Kelly hadn’t explicitly called it such, her workspace, and others like it, embraces a sort of modern separatism: a callback to century-old feminist solutions that proposed that the answer to being kept out of male-dominant spaces was simply to create new, better ones.
Make Lemonade also hosts regular “master classes,” Kelly told me, to help women “get their shit done,” whether that’s learning more about social media or how to earn a steady income as a freelancer. Such things sound so simple and small on their own, but they are monumental when contrasted against the trenches women can find themselves in at traditional workplaces — trenches they may not even realize they’ve been waging war from until they step out of them. Kelly mused that Make Lemonade members are surely working on a lot of feelings, whether they know it or not. Radical things can happen when women feel safe — not to mention when they feel it’s safe, and even necessary, to help other women. When they don’t have to worry so much about power because everyone has it, at least while they are there.
It isn’t utopia. I’m sure some potential (and even current) members don’t respond to the space’s ethos, which hews more closely to empowerment messaging than it does to outright disruption. Personally, I’d rather have a never-ending lunch with Will Ferrell and Seth Rogen while Family Guy plays in the background than adopt the princess-aligned “mood” of that day: sparkle. Still, it beats the de facto all-day, every-day moods of many other workplaces: harassment, exclusion, aggression. Just look at what was going on at some of the world’s highest-profile companies around the time Make Lemonade, and many other women’s co-working spaces like it, launched. Over at Google, one male employee named James Damore sent out a now infamous ten-page screed that went viral inside the company, and then around the entire internet. Titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the memo attacked the company’s (honestly, not very effective) diversity initiatives, arguing, in a very Peterson-esque way, that under-representation in the workplace exists because men and women are inherently different. Because women’s personalities are different, wrote Damore, they have a “harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. . . . This leads to exclusory programs . . . and swaths of men without support.”169
After the memo was leaked, numerous women came forward to say they had left Google because of racial and gender discrimination.170 One woman, Qichen Zhang, a technical specialist, told media that she was in the middle of a bustling Google office when a white man started “joking” about her hiring. “He said, ‘It must’ve been really easy for you to get your job because you’re an Asian woman and people assume you’re good at math,’” Zhang said. “I didn’t see a lot of women, especially Asian women, Black women or other women of color in the executive ranks. I didn’t see any opportunities for myself.” Another woman, who is Black and asked the Guardian not to name her for fear of retaliation, told the paper that she faced discrimination every day she worked for the company as a specialist: “I felt like I didn’t belong nor did anybody want me to belong.” We know this awful behaviour is pervasive, too — happening anywhere women are not traditionally represented in power, which is mostly everywhere.
On second thought, I’d take the damn sparkles.
Gender separatism has long been a recurrent — and a recurrently controversial — solution to a misogynistic world. Women’s clubs began their rise in the late nineteenth century, in direct response to women’s exclusion from the male-dominated public sphere. One of the most famous, and most influential, of the early clubs originated after journalist Jane Cunningham Croly and several other women were barred from entering a New York City all-male press club dinner honouring Charles Dickens. The men refused them tickets on the grounds that it would supposedly make the event “promiscuous.”171 In response, Croly decided women needed their own club.172 She called it Sorosis. While technically that means “aggregation” and refers to a grouping of plants that bear fruit, let’s be honest: it also sounds like it could be the name of a badass Marvel villain who threatens to end the world with equal rights. And the club did adopt an unabashedly feminist outlook, bent on reforming women’s roles in and influence on the wider society.
On the twenty-first anniversary of Sorosis, Croly called on women’s clubs throughout the United States to band together. (In my head, she’s on a parapet yelling, “Feminists Unite!” cape blazing behind her, but in reality she hosted a convention in New York City, drawing considerable, if less fantastical, attention.) Sixty-three clubs did so, officially forming the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.173 Croly later wrote of her motives, referring to herself in third person: “Many women, she herself among the rest, were hungry for the society of women, that is, for the society of those whose deeper natures had been roused to activity, who had been seized by the divine spirit of inquiry and aspiration, who were interested in the thought and progress of the age, and in what other women were thinking and doing.”174
Much of the early work of the Federation and other women’s clubs focused on, as one researcher put it, “seeking to wrest some social, political and economic power from the men who dominated public life.” Still without the vote, or any high position within influential institutions, women decided to instead work outside of male systems (which were, at the time, basically all of them) and to exercise their collective power to effect the type of social change they wanted to see.175 They secured significant victories against child labour, expanded opportunities for public education, and joined the abolitionist movement, speaking out against lynchings in the Southern states.176 In doing so, these women gained experience in types of activity usually reserved for men: organizing public speakers, raising money, writing publicity materials, lobbying politicians, circulating petitions, and so on — all useful strategies to broaden women’s power in society. Needless to say, that freaked out a lot of men, including former U.S. president Grover Cleveland, who wrote an article in Ladies Home Journal in which he discussed the “danger of the club habit.” Maintaining women already had enough power in the nation because they, he suggested, essentially influenced their husbands and sons, Grover wrote, “I believe that it should be boldly declared that the best and safest club for a woman to patronize is her home.”177
Luckily, it didn’t matter what one former president thought. In gathering, women began to realize they had a whole host of needs; and if the men wouldn’t let them into their established structures, they’d meet those needs themselves. Soon, they had established women-only professional associations for doctors and lawyers, and women-only unions for factory workers. They even started a secret society or two, including the Eastern Star (mirroring Freemasonry, minus the blockbuster movies and conspiracy theories). Women’s clubs held operas and built libraries. One member, Alice Ames Winter, described the sheer breadth of them thusly, displaying both a contemporary snobbery and a tart dislike of women who chose to remain coddled: “Women’s clubs are distinctly all-American in their constituency; ranging geographically from the big city organization with its thousands to the little body of isolated farm women or the ranchers’ wives who drive sixty miles across the waste to attend a meeting, and sell one of the cows to get money to go to a convention; ranging intellectually from the Ph.D. to the shut-in woman who, in her middle age, is groping toward ‘culture’; ranging socially from the wage earner to the anathematized parasitic wife — whom by the way we used to call by the kinder name of lady . . .”178
In both Canada179 and the United States, women’s clubs, in all their various forms, also became the backbone of the suffrage movement. The message was the same everywhere: having achieved critical mass, the clubs would work outside the system to change the system — and to change women themselves. As one Federation club member put it, looking back on the organization’s first fifty years, only an anti-feminist could love a woman’s formerly narrow life: “She wove and spun, baked and brewed, sewed, dripped candles, nursed and taught her children and stayed at home. What else could she do . . . ?”180 The “New Woman” — a name they often called themselves — had a chance at a different purpose, especially as the Federation grew to astounding numbers, making their own influence impossible to ignore: “What if the social power of two million members of the General Federation of Women’s clubs may become the determining force in the readjustment of our society?” What if, indeed?
After the First World War, during which many more women stepped into previously male-dominated spheres, another question grew thunderous: Why budget the house and not the nation? Once women did win the vote, that question only became heavier on their tongues.
“What do women want?” asked Winter. “The overwhelming majority of club women were suffragists. They wanted the vote. Having secured it, their major interest is how to use it.” The answer to that question soon became clear: to effect equality. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, many women distanced themselves from the self-segregation movement in favour of integration. They believed, buoyed by the independence gained during both world wars and by their legal emancipation, that the need for separatism was behind them. Alas, not quite.
In the past century, the cresting backlash against that lurch toward equality has almost always triggered a sort of half-voluntary, half-forced exit from male power structures. Not every feminist exit (Fexit?) has been as well-mannered or gentle as the first. While early suffragists may have wanted the vote, they had little desire to overhaul the era’s fundamental notions of gender, class, and race supremacy. Many early feminists also placed a high value on women’s traditional roles, exalting both wifehood and motherhood. As feminism’s priorities and will to challenge conventions shifted over time, however, so too did the idea of useful separatism. In the twentieth century, the idea of a woman’s exit from male-dominated spaces would go through many cycles of radicalism and mainstream softening, each approach shifting to match the feminist movement’s rise and fall. Notably, during the 1970s and ’80s an openly radical lesbian separatism movement rose — underscored by the belief that violence against women, and the hatred that pushes it, meant women should detach themselves from male society, ultimately seeking to abandon it entirely. These separatists themselves often viewed their goals as more sweeping than those of mainstream feminists. As one put it, writing about the movement years later, many feminists thought society could be corrected and that inequality was, essentially, a mistaken lapse in a system still committed to good. “The analyses of lesbian separatists, on the other hand,” she wrote, “have defined such inequities not as moral lapses but rather as deliberate constructions signed to benefit one group at the expense of another and to maintain the supremacy of one group over another.”181
Radical lesbian separatist beliefs filtered through to the mainstream, leading to a boost in the creation of women’s studies programs in universities and colleges, as well as women-owned enterprises such as music festivals, music companies, academic journals, and feminist magazines.182 Many of these ventures still exist today. Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Gloria Steinem founded Ms. magazine in 1971, for example, and Canada’s own Herizons launched in 1979, beginning as the Manitoba Women’s Newspaper. The Feminist Press kicked off in New York City in 1970 by publishing “lost” feminist classics, such as works by Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman;183 Gilman’s novel Herland, released in 1915, is about a secret, peaceful civilization of women that is eventually infiltrated by men (kind of like Wonder Woman without all the punching). These projects and spaces were seen as essential for the advancement of equality — places where women could define their own goals and work toward them without the constant drain of men.184
Today’s resurgence of clubs for women and people living beyond the traditional gender binary have the same flavour of defiance. Trump’s win, the Women’s March on Washington, and then #MeToo have all cascaded into a rise in the same sort of consciousness-raising groups and women’s-first enterprises that ballooned in the early 1900s and again in the 1970s. From book clubs, travel clubs, and brunch clubs, to co-working spaces, music festivals, and curated shops — not to mention a whole realm of digital collectives — women are, once again, forming sites of resistance. These spaces celebrate non-male creators, and host conversations on everything from weed-smoking to emotional labour to sexual abuse.
I remember attending one packed event, run by the Bad Girls Book Club, that looked at Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood, with a panel of women discussing, in stark honesty, what the once-expected life goal meant for women today. “There are a million different ways to live the female experience,” one of the speakers said. The problem is we have been too quiet about them.
Sure, a mass women-only book club is a whole lot tamer than advocating for a world sans men. However, in the context of creating space to work against a culture that’s increasingly revealed as one steeped in male power, like so much bitter tea, it’s downright revolutionary.
Which means, of course, these spaces are under attack.
I learned from a fairly early age that some men simply do not like the idea of women gathering without them. They think it’s silly, antiquated, too feminist — a relic of a time before our supposed equality. What need is there to prioritize other groups? The first concert I ever attended was 1999’s Lilith Fair. At the time, I had just turned fifteen. My personal politics were still geared more toward girl power than riot grrrl, and I had no idea that Sarah McLachlan had founded the travelling music festival not just as a cool thing, but as an act of defiance. The 1990s had ushered in a travelling festival trend, with tours like Lollapalooza skyrocketing in popularity. Male-fronted acts dominated all of them; radio stations refused to play women artists back to back. Reportedly sick of it all, and inspired by other shows she’d played with all-women-fronted acts, McLachlan decided to start her own tour, highlighting women. Few thought it would succeed; it became one of the top-grossing festivals of the year.
Still, McLachlan was asked constantly why she wanted to exclude men — even though she clearly described the show as women-centric, not women only. “The other really awful question that we got often was, ‘Why do you hate men?’” she told Rolling Stone in an interview celebrating the festival’s twentieth anniversary. “And I said, ‘What does celebrating women have to do with hating men? That says way more about you and your ego than anything else.’”
Of all the women-first spaces that now exist, the most prominent and empire-like of them all is U.S.-based co-working space The Wing. Co-founders Lauren Kassan (a former director at fitness titan ClassPass) and Audrey Gelman (who worked on Clinton’s 2008 campaign and is one of Lena Dunham’s best friends) opened The Wing’s first location in Manhattan’s Flatiron District in October 2016, three weeks before the presidential election. Part of their motivation, Gelman told The Washington Post, was to celebrate “the golden age of women in power.” Well. Then, she gathered with three hundred members of the new space to watch that fateful night unfold. “The concept of The Wing went from something triumphant to something that felt more protective overnight,” she told the paper. Women went from feeling elated to feeling afraid. They wanted safe spaces.185 But as one legal student and scholar quipped two years later, as The Wing expanded: “Entrenched power structures don’t act in good faith when they’re threatened. ‘Hey, men have nearly every public space in the world, maybe women could have a few’ is unlikely to be the Fox News narrative.”186
And, as much as it was very definitely a corporate enterprise from the start, The Wing gave (some) women the space for disruption. Vox interviewed one such member in early 2019.187 A reproductive justice activist, she told the publication that working in public spaces can be difficult. She can get some uncomfortable reactions from those around her whenever she says “abortion,” and she often says it repeatedly throughout the day. That doesn’t happen at The Wing. She can work on a comfortable couch, say “abortion” whenever she needs to without any “side-eye,” and never has to deal with men “asking me stupid questions and trying to hit on me while I’m trying to read and get my shit done.” The Wing also extends its “women power” ethos to its (mostly) women employees. Everyone, including part-time workers, has health-care benefits — a huge thing in the United States — and also stock options. At many locations, they have access to child-care facilities. The company hires formerly incarcerated women and is upfront about also hiring women who’ve experienced domestic violence. Everyone makes a minimum of $16.50 an hour. (For reference, in New York City, where many of The Wing’s locations operate, the minimum wage for a company of its size is $15 an hour.188 And in Canada, as of April 2019, the highest minimum wage is $15 per hour, and the lowest is just over $11 per hour.189)
I visited one of The Wing’s New York City locations in January 2019 with a friend who is a member. The two-storey space I toured was feminine, definitely, but not in a painfully obnoxious way — I’m thinking of those spaces where it feels like a man has imagined what a woman would want. The décor is pastel and velvet, the effect calming, not saccharine, with pops of greenery accenting an “I’m chill” vibe throughout the open, lit-just-so space. There is a sky-high, colour-coded library as you walk in, filled with books by women authors. Although nine-to-five had already passed, the place was still bustling, projecting an atmosphere that felt more focused than anxious. Women chatted on the phone, chatted with each other, gestured animatedly, typed fast on their laptops, and scribbled in their notebooks. Past all the work space is a meditation room and a beauty room famously filled with luxe products. I grabbed a desperately needed bobby pin and took a selfie with my friend.
Looping back to the front, near the café, which serves free coffee, were stacks of The Wing’s magazine, No Man’s Land. I flipped through a few pages of the inaugural issue, reading a note from Gelman, its official publisher. “The institutions that have long defined what success, prestige, and prosperity are in American society typically have one thing in common: they were founded — and are largely still run — by men,” she wrote. “At The Wing, we ask: Why not create organizations where men no longer write the rules?” Inside are profiles on working women, including Angela Dimayuga, chef at New York’s Mission Chinese Food; rapper Remy Ma; and actor and model Hari Nef. Another woman profiled in the magazine wears a T-shirt that read “Raise Girls and Boys the Same Way.” There is an article on emotional labour and another on dressing for power. Also, there are stickers. So, yes, The Wing is an explosion of aesthetics and politics — a perfectly tuned blend of everything that makes modern, commercial feminism popular — but it also clearly calls to a deeper yearning in women. It was one of the first places I’d ever been to that made me feel settled, as though it was, indeed, made for me. And that, according to many people, was the problem.
To be clear, there is much to criticize about The Wing’s marketing of itself as a haven for women. Among the legitimate, necessary questions we should ask of places like The Wing are: Which women are included and which are patently excluded? Who gets to define the term “woman”? And what about all the other groups who also suffer from the systems perpetuated by the patriarchy — do places like this leave them behind? (None of these questions is exclusive to The Wing, and all of them are addressed in greater depth later in this chapter.) The vital conversation that those questions spark is very different from the conversation that actually happened, though.
The first blow to The Wing and its No Man’s Land domination came in spring 2018 when the popularity of the co-working space brought it to the attention of the New York City Commission on Human Rights. Initially, The Wing did not let men join the club or visit as guests, and the commission decided to open an investigation into its practices, specifically looking at whether this constituted a violation of the city’s law forbidding any business to deny entrance on the basis of gender.190 Then, a couple of months later, a (seemingly) incredibly entitled man named James E. Pietrangelo applied to The Wing’s branch in Washington, D.C., and was effectively denied membership. A practising attorney, he launched a lawsuit in August 2018, claiming “The Wing has a policy, pattern, and practice of discrimination against men.”191
The Wing isn’t the only no-men venture to have faced such backlash in recent years. Dangerous things — like equity and a crumbling patriarchy — happen when oppressed people band together. Another lawyer, San Diego–based Alfred Rava, has apparently made it his life’s mission to sue organizations that he believes discriminate against men. One, Women on Course, designed to help women enter and network in the male-dominated golf world, settled with Rava in 2013, couldn’t stay afloat, was later sold, and then shut down.192 Another, Ladies Get Paid, an initiative to help close the wage gap, was served on the day of the inaugural Women’s March on Washington for barring men from its events. The organization settled, nearly went bankrupt, and had to launch a crowdfunding campaign — which raised more than $115,000193 — to keep its doors open.194 In San Diego, members of the country’s oldest men’s rights group sued a women’s networking organization, Chic CEO, again for apparently barring their entry to an event. The organization’s founder was forced to settle; she later significantly downsized.195 Over in Germany, in 2019 a man launched a lawsuit against a town after it designated some well-lit spaces — close to the entrance/exit of a car park — for women, following a violent attack.196
I have my doubts about whether any of these men sincerely sought to join these organizations or use these spaces in the ways for which they were intended. Why would they? It seems far more likely that they saw something that was not for them, something that threatened their formerly impenetrable power structures, and wanted to destroy it, not unlike the men who see women’s workplace authority as a reasonable motivator for harassment. Like, can you imagine men creating the same furor to join a sewing class exclusively for women and non-binary people?
Such backlash isn’t limited to lawsuits, either. It can come in the form of dismissal, and it can come in the form of refusal. I spoke to one co-working and event space for women and non-binary members in Richmond, Virginia, called The Broad. This organization centres much of its mission on prioritizing purchasing from and working with the same demographic it serves. In its first year, nearly 40 percent of the space’s discretionary spending went to women. So when the local paper asked to do a profile on the space, founder Ali Greenberg responded with what had become a routine request to media: please don’t send a male journalist or photographer. The photo desk editor wouldn’t acquiesce, despite having women photographers on staff; the profile languished and was never published.
In the case of The Wing, at least, the controversy has spurred some good. Although the company has maintained that the two events were not related, while still in the midst of both the lawsuit and the human rights investigation, The Wing released a new, clearer membership policy. It states more explicitly that the space welcomes members “who identify as transgender or beyond the gender binary,” adding that it has adopted written “policies to ensure that our staff is trained not to make assumptions about someone’s identity based on how they present, or to ask prospective members or guests to self-identify.”197 Around the same time, The Wing also released a copy of Pietrangelo’s application to the court in Washington. Even under the new policy, the company argued, it was unlikely his application would have been approved. In response to one of the key questions on the form — “What do you think is the biggest challenge facing women today?” — Pietrangelo had written: “The same challenges facing men.”198
Truth be told, not all women face the same challenges either. For as much as women’s clubs and spaces have provided a radical refuge from the power structures that seek to dominate women’s lives, they have also replicated those same power imbalances, whether consciously or not. In many ways, the women-only movement has mirrored the challenges of feminism itself: the centring of biological definitions at the expense of transgender women; the exclusion of Indigenous women and women of colour from its most visible and influential positions; claims of battling tokenism while institutionalizing that same philosophy in its own histories and organizations. Many women have claimed to me that feminism has always been deliberately intersectional, even if that’s not the language past generations have used. Those women are usually white, usually able-bodied, and have usually benefited from feminism in a way that not everyone has. There’s no other way to put it: those women are also wrong. And if we cannot engage honestly with past and current wrongs, then we have little hope of building better spaces now.
For all the true good the General Federation of Women’s Clubs did, it was also riven by a fierce racism within its ranks. Despite a motto that claimed “Unity in Diversity,” in 1900 Georgia’s white club members rallied against Boston woman Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a Black activist who had formed the Woman’s Era Club seven years earlier. When she attempted to take her seat at that year’s national convention, the General Federation’s president, Rebecca Douglas Lowe, refused to recognize her right to do so. Apparently, Lowe had accepted the Woman’s Era Club’s membership dues before she realized its members were primarily Black. Once she realized what she’d done, she asked Ruffin to return the club’s credentials. Ruffin refused. The Federation then demanded that the Massachusetts State Federation, to which Ruffin’s club belonged, revoke her club’s membership. To its credit, those women also refused — and actively supported Ruffin in her fight against the General Federation, which then moved to make the national organization for white women only. But here’s the thing: by the General Federation’s own rules, Ruffin’s club, and any other club with valid state membership, was a de facto member and therefore guaranteed a seat at the national convention’s table. It had always been that way. “Therefore, it is important to note that in 1900 Georgia’s white clubwomen set out not to preserve the status quo,” wrote one historian, “but rather to change the rules.” They won. Despite protests, their motion passed in 1902. At the national level, but not the state level, the Federation became for white women only.199
And such exclusionary mindsets have endured. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which launched in 1976 and became a seminal women-only event until it folded in 2015, exposed the endemic transphobia within feminism and the huge potential pitfalls of women-only spaces. The world-reshaping power of the festival, which started essentially as a party in the woods, is evident in the many laudatory accounts of its celebrations. One regular attendee wrote in 2003 that “When [somebody] asked me when I feel I am most outside of the patriarchy, I immediately answered ‘At Michigan.’ . . . The experience of the Festival is to me that quintessential experience that tells me that another world, a world outside the patriarchy, is possible.” That particular account appears in a newsletter decorated with hand-drawn squares that detail “One hundred simple things you can do to end the patriarchy.” One suggestion is to “Make love to yourself tenderly.” Another is to “Grow flowers.” A third is to “Assume your ethnic and cultural identity is not normative.”200
And yet.
Promotional material for the festival itself reminded those who attended to “Look around. Womyn built this city. We carried every box, board and speaker. We pipe every shower, fix every truck and chop every vegetable.”201 It all sounds so revolutionary, except for the festival’s policy of being intended for “womyn who were born womyn.” Even in the face of criticism, festival founder Lisa Vogel has repeatedly stated there is nothing exclusionary about the festival’s policy. After the Indigo Girls bowed out of the festival in 2013 — yes, there’s not even the excuse of being “of the time” — Vogel affirmed the policy the following year, as she has done any time public criticisms are made. In a letter to the community, she reiterated, practically verbatim, the statements she’d made elsewhere, maintaining that “this space, for this week, is intended to be for womyn who were born female, raised as girls and who continue to identify as womyn.”202 She went on to insist that it was not a ban. “We do not ‘restrict festival attendance to cisgendered womyn, prohibiting trans women’ as was recently claimed . . . We do not and will not question anyone’s gender. Rather, we trust the greater queer community to respect this intention, leaving the onus on each individual to choose whether or how to respect it.”203 Neither she nor her many defenders seemed to understand that “leaving the onus on each individual” scapegoats discrimination onto the target — You chose this! — while simultaneously refusing to condemn transphobia. Saying “we won’t stop you” is entire continents away from saying “we welcome you.” Which, to be absolutely clear, is the bare minimum any feminist space can say to trans women and gender-nonconforming people.
Echoes of both racism and transphobia persist today in both feminist and women-only spaces, even in those that are trying to do better. Part of this is growing and learning; that these conversations are happening, and with an apparent openness to reflection and change, is an essential part of figuring out what new systems of power might look like. Although I understand why everyone is growing impatient waiting for cisgender, able-bodied white women to hurry up and figure out that they, too, wield considerable power, and to stop abusing it.
Kaitlyn Borysiewicz is the communications director and co-founder of The Melanin Collective, a social enterprise for women of colour, and she wrote in a blog post for the group that “the golden age of women in power” that The Wing trumpets often seems to include only a certain type of woman, relegating the rest to stick it out in the Middle Ages — particularly when annual membership for the space runs into the thousands.204 “When the choice is between putting food on the table and saving towards retirement or paying the heating bill or buying membership into an exclusive women’s club, I think the choice is pretty clear,” she argues. “And yet, The Wing is being lauded as a radical injection into women’s organizations? Interesting.” She goes on to say, “I write all this not to crap on The Wing, but to complicate notions of white women creating seemingly inclusive spaces without a single nod to the experiences of women of color. Women of color face extraordinary barriers, not just in the workplace, but in their health and wellbeing, finances, relationships, education, and more.” And, while The Wing is certainly one of the best known of the contemporary “no men k thx centred” spaces, it is certainly not the only one with membership dues high enough to put it in the realm of inclusive-exclusive.
The Wing is not even the most expensive club I visited. That honour goes to the Verity Club in Toronto, Canada’s only high-end private social club for women. Although it does offer co-working space, its owner and founder, Mary Aitken, stressed to me that that isn’t at all how she classifies the club. Unapologetically lush, the club features room after impeccably decorated room, each managing to attain a sort of quiet opulence, an oxymoron that can exist only among the truly, tastefully wealthy. There is a gym, a boutique hotel and gourmet restaurant that are both open to the public, a spa, a pool, a gorgeous flower shop, a small fairy-tale courtyard, a library space that hosts workshops, a selection of boardrooms, a bar, and space upon space for women to network, work, and close deals. Aitken gave me a tour in the early months of 2019, moving through the luxuriously sprawling club at an impossibly high-clipped pace, stopping to greet nearly everyone we saw by name. Though buoyed by the profits from the hotel and restaurant, the club itself, Aitken told me, is a money-losing enterprise, and has been for most of the years since its 2003 founding.
That does not mean that it is cheap. The Verity charges a sliding scale for its annual membership, depending on a potential member’s age. Those under thirty pay a one-time initiation fee of $4,700 and yearly fees of $2,095; those over forty-five pay an initiation fee of $10,700 and then $3,195 every year after. Such fees would relegate most early- to mid-career professional women (including me) and aspiring entrepreneurs to a steady, possibly permanent diet of neon-orange Kraft Dinner. (Even then.) Aitken called the membership diverse, with members ranging in age from seventeen to ninety-three, and she proudly chatted about the club’s work with teenage girls from lower-income neighbourhoods. Still, she doesn’t mince words about who the club serves (and is also fairly careful not to call it a feminist enterprise). There are more than twenty Verity members who have been honoured with the Order of Canada. This is a place for women who are already at the top of their careers, or very much want to get there.
These tense patterns of inclusion and exclusion frequently play out in other feminist spaces as well. Sally Dimachki is a project co-ordinator with Ottawa’s Refugee 613, an organization that acts as a hub for refugees in Canada’s capital city, and I spoke with her one early morning in March 2019. Our conversation happened, by chance, to take place just hours after news of the massacre at two mosques in New Zealand, further underscoring the rise of a festering Islamophobia, and also the urgent concern that no part of that hate be replicated in feminist spaces. A Muslim, Dimachki had immigrated from Syria to France at a young age, eventually ending up in rural New Brunswick, where she was often the only Muslim in any given space. Those experiences made her feel as though she would never have access to power and would need to self-filter her ambitions. Now, she is keenly aware when those diminishing power dynamics are replicated in women-only spaces. It happens often.
“I’ve been in many decision-making rooms,” she told me, where she’s seen “an automatic power dynamic and a specific type of confidence that comes with being Canadian-born, not having an accent, and having an education.” She recalled a diverse table where about half the women had immigrant, refugee backgrounds and the other half were Canadian-born white women. The white women were loud, confident, and sure of their points. Meanwhile, nobody else was speaking — a sign that the white women took to mean they agreed. Dimachki didn’t believe it was that simple. Looking at the unspooling, smothering power dynamic, she decided, No, I’ve had enough. And so she verbally battled these white women, one against five, repeatedly trying to explain the many layers of feminism. One woman’s background might mean her feminism looked different; that only meant it was even more important to account for her lived experience. At the end of that meeting, many of the silent women thanked her for being their voice. That was when she realized: sometimes it isn’t about getting more women at the table. Even when women sit exclusively at the table, the power scale can still tilt into inequity. The real question is this: Who has the opportunity to speak?
I joined the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club in early 2017 after a jarring experience at a co-ed kickboxing club — the kind that almost completely suffocated my interest in the sport. I’d been a member of co-ed clubs off and on since I was fourteen. As a kid, the experience of being in a testosterone-charged environment initially registered as unremarkable. The club I grew up attending was strict, unwavering in its discipline, and not the sort of place where a beefed-up guy could do anything about not being as skilled as a teenage slip of a girl.
The older I got, the more I saw it, though — the thing that happens when you’re a girl in a place built for men (there was quite literally no women’s change room). As I watched some of the teen boys advance faster than me, even though I was better, I grew both puzzled and frustrated. When I was eighteen, the discipline of class no longer protected me, and comments about my looks filtered through the in-between times, before and after training, in social settings. I began to wear makeup to class, constantly making adjustments to my appearance in the mirrors that lined the wall, worrying incessantly over whether I was skinny enough. I look back on that time now, imagining that girl so expertly applying foundation to her hairline, and feel a pang.
The co-ed club I joined as an adult largely spared me from comments about my body — but it did not spare my body itself. The majority of instructors there were volunteers, donating their time once a week to teach a class. In one session, a male instructor advised the men to partner up with the women and practise grabbing us in the various ways somebody might, presumably, attack us if we were out dancing at a club. We were chastised if we did not hit hard enough, or yell loud enough, to fend off our would-be rapist. What a fun game of make-believe to have absolutely no warning about or choice to participate in! My unease cascaded straight into fear after another class in which I was paired with a much larger, almost gleefully aggressive man. Holding the punching and kicking strike pads against my body, which were meant to shield me from the bulk of the force behind his blows, I could feel my body struggling to absorb the impact. Every time I flinched in pain or struggled for a grip on the pads, he hit and kicked harder, yelling at me to keep up. It felt like every blow was tattooing You. Do. Not. Belong. Here. Back at home, it wasn’t long before I saw bruises across my torso, my arms. Time stretched out like taffy before I ventured to another club. Something that had once felt like a haven now spiked anxiety through me.
I did not know to expect everything Newsgirls gave to me. It feels impossibly difficult to describe the value of implicit ease and safety unless you have spent most of your life without both, not even realizing how bankrupt you were. The club is open to all genders, but cisgender men are invited to come only to certain weekly classes. There is one washroom, and it is prominently marked as all-gender. Beyond gender, the club actively encourages the full breadth of diversity in its membership, including Indigenous women, women who are disabled, women of colour, immigrant women, those who belong to LGBTQ+ communities, and those of all different body sizes, incomes, and religions. There is both a food and a book bank, and the club itself is plastered with notices advertising women- and trans-led initiatives, marches, rallies, plays, and services.
It’s a place where people learn to do all the things they’ve been told not to: yell, be aggressive, stand up for themselves. It’s a space for everyone, but technically, presumably, so is every public space. This, however, is a space that was designed for everyone else first, and when it invited the men back in, it was into a culture totally reimagined on our terms, without them. It’s a place where I never care if I haven’t shaved for weeks. A place where we happily turned off the fans in the sweltering summer because it triggered one survivor. A place where everyone is asked for their pronoun when they sign up and no instructor will ever touch you without your clear consent. It’s a place where you never have to pretend.
Every once in a while, I’ve seen men try to re-shift the power; it never works. More commonly, though, I see men who are grateful for the space just as it is. In the years since I’ve started there, I’ve volunteered to teach classes when the owner cannot make it to coach. Because I’m usually there on the co-ed nights, it’s not unusual for me to get a few men dropping in when I do. These men are almost always gracious, taking in criticism without ego, asking for help, and understanding, without anyone having to tell them, that they are not in charge.
This is just the very tip of it. There are so many reasons to host clubs, events, co-working spaces, and more that shift the focus away from men. These reasons also go far beyond addressing the routine harassment the #MeToo movement exposed. The gender gap in the success of start-ups completely disappears, for example, when women fund other women (without that factor, it’s gaping).205 Women CEOs, and their companies, may be at a disadvantage when the power structures beneath them don’t change, as we saw in the last chapter, but they both do significantly better as the percentage of women employees increases.206 And, as has been much reported, in mixed settings women are interrupted more than men207 and spend appreciably less time talking than men — one study showed it’s by as much as 75 percent.208 They can’t change much of anything if they are routinely silenced.
Still, I struggled with the idea of exiting male power structures forever. Who would do the hard work of dismantling gender binaries and power structures everywhere else if we’re all dancing naked in the forest or sipping kombucha at our pastel-pink desks? I wondered instead if it were possible to replicate the deliberate magic of my boxing club on a wider scale — to kick out the toxicity, but then invite the men back into a remade world, one built for everyone. I wasn’t sure what that would look like, but a place that bucked beauty standards, nurtured power for the oppressed, and welcomed everyone in dignity seemed like a good place to start.
In December 2018, I attended a talk, hosted by the New Democratic Party, featuring feminist foremother Gloria Steinem. Full of humour and dry wit, Steinem surprised me when she contradicted many of the feminists of her generation and proclaimed, early in her remarks, that “There is no gender. It was invented and we can dis-invent it.” This statement speaks to the thornier aspects of creating space without men, fundamentally defined without their input. To dis-invent gender would mean also abandoning things like binary restroom spaces and award shows that delineate skill by gender. Yes, please, I’m all for both. We need more washroom spaces, especially all-gender ones. And, like, is there really a difference between lady acting and man acting? Don’t even.
But working toward those goals also means asking some uncomfortable questions about our wilful exit from the patriarchy: Can women-only spaces truly be defiant if they’re also mirroring traditional patterns of segregation? Even more uncomfortably, do they underscore gender segregation as a thing women endorse? When we leave, are we sending the subconscious message that a woman’s place is, in fact, outside of all the traditional systems of power? I thought about a piece of news that broke as I was writing this book: in March 2019, NASA cancelled its first all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station because it could not find enough spacesuits to fit the women. Except that all-female team was only two women.209 I want to live in a world where gender separation does not lead to ridiculous shit like this. (And I would also like to live in a world that doesn’t report this depressing news with the quip, “Blame it on a wardrobe malfunction.”)
Feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye has argued that there is a clear difference between intentional, feminist separatism (whereby women and others choose to build their own spaces) and an existence at the borders of power (whereby women and others are pushed out or kept at a distance from meaningful participation in whatever space they want to be in, be it a workspace, a sports club, or even their own homes and personal relationships). Frye wrote the 1980s book Some Reflections on Separatism and Power, in which she grappled with the unwieldy “kaleidoscopic” nature of separatism. The theme of separation, she wrote, can be interpreted into a multitude of variations, from divorce to women’s shelters to the expansion of child care to witches’ covens to abortion services, and on and on. Touching on the backlash to come, she also noted that the idea of separatism is often “vigorously obscured, trivialized, mystified and outright denied,” not just by men, but also by feminist apologists who are embarrassed to admit a need for a space of their own. The difference in effectiveness — and whether women gain or lose power — lies in intent.210
A purposeful separation, she wrote, is one “from men and from institutions, relationships, roles and activities which are male-defined, male-dominated and operating for the benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilege — this separation being initiated or maintained at will by women.”211 It depends, as always, on who has the power.
For Rachel Kelly, the ultimate success of her company Make Lemonade is rooted in its future redundancy. Like many of the modern separatists, she believes a true utopia isn’t a world that draws a line between straight, cisgender white men and everyone else, but one that uses the lessons and healing and reimaginings learned in the self-imposed break to make things better for everybody. “Right now, this is wonderful. This is beautiful,” she told me. “The point where we’re at right now. But I think we all agree that in 150 to 200 years, the need for spaces like these won’t . . . exist. This is the part that I’m coming to peace with. We can use this space and this movement and everything that we’re doing right now to push us toward the future. We also need to understand this will be a part of history.” On reflection, she added that such discrete environments have an important function: “to celebrate women and our history together.”
Yes, but, two hundred years? What a bleak timeline. I wanted to know what women were doing right now to cut through the bullshit. And, after hearing about how the workplace had failed so many women, I especially wanted to know if we could ever upend one of the oldest adages around: money is power.
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