Anarcha-feminism is the analysis that patriarchy is not a separate system of domination but is structurally interlocked with the state, capitalism, and colonialism. It follows that you cannot abolish one without confronting the others: a revolution that liberates workers while subordinating women has not understood what hierarchy is.
The double critique
Anarcha-feminism critiques both the patriarchal left and liberal feminism simultaneously.
The patriarchal left — including much of the historical anarchist movement — treats gender domination as secondary to class struggle. Women are told to wait: first the revolution, then liberation. But this deferral is itself a structure of domination: who decides what is primary and what is secondary? Whose concerns count as political and whose as personal? The answer reproduces exactly the hierarchy the movement claims to oppose.
Liberal feminism seeks women’s equal participation in existing institutions — the state, the corporation, the military. Anarcha-feminism rejects this as seeking inclusion in structures of domination rather than their abolition. The goal is not a woman president but a world without presidents. Not equal exploitation but the abolition of exploitation.
Prefiguring gender liberation
Because anarchism insists that means must embody ends (prefigurative politics), anarcha-feminism demands that anarchist organizations practice non-patriarchal relations now — not after the revolution, not as a secondary priority, but as a structural feature of how organizing is done. This means confronting gendered patterns of domination within movements: who speaks, who is listened to, who does the unglamorous organizational labor, who is credited, whose safety is prioritized.
Key figures
Emma Goldman practiced anarcha-feminism before the term existed. Her insistence on the indivisibility of freedom — that you cannot separate economic, political, gendered, and sexual liberation — laid the groundwork. Voltairine de Cleyre extended the analysis to marriage, education, and religious authority as specific mechanisms of gendered domination.
Contemporary anarcha-feminism draws on Black feminist, Indigenous feminist, and queer theory to analyze how gender domination intersects with race, colonialism, and sexuality — and insists that these are not additions to anarchist analysis but clarifications of what anti-domination always required.
Related
- patriarchy — the structure anarcha-feminism analyzes
- freedom — indivisible across gender, class, race, and sexuality
- prefigurative politics — demanding non-patriarchal practice now
- exploitation — extends to unwaged gendered labor
- colonialism — imposed European gender hierarchies