Introduction

In this chapter, we explore minority women's strategies for survival in informal spaces: self-help groups, DIY networks and grassroots community organisations, as well as our participants’ personal narratives of, and reflections on, coping within neoliberal third sector organisations. As we discussed in Chapter One, we seek to redefine ‘what counts’ and who enjoys the identity of ‘activist’, by naming and analysing minority women's politics of survival. Recognising and valuing the political actions of minority women in both public and private spaces is central to our understandings of minority women's political behaviour in Europe. Throughout this book, we have defined ‘activism’ broadly in order to capture the diverse ways in which minority women assert themselves as political agents. Here we turn our focus to the grassroots and personal narratives.

We argue that minority women's activism is either misrecognised or erased by the white Left because, as we discussed in Chapter Two, socialist, populist and feminist theories and politics, imbued with political racelessness, are hostile to discussions of race, ethnicity and migration as they fracture ‘universal’ understandings of the ‘working class’ and ‘women’. Given this hostility to intersectional politics, this problematises minority women's politics of self-care and the solidarity work that minority women activists seek to build with their white counterparts.

We centre the activism of minority women and note that it is often connected to third sector spaces and should not be dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ for this reason. Yet we also demonstrate that no space is immune from ‘enterprise’ (explored in the previous chapter), and show the ways in which context matters in each case to limit as well as frame minority women's activism as a politics of survival. In Chapter Four, we saw the ways in which particular features of the French, Scottish and English cases shape what is possible for, with and by minority women in the formal third sector. Here we see what is being done and what can be done in these informal spaces. These spaces are sometimes depleted by austerity, sexism and racism but are also sites of resistance. We conclude by demanding that this politics of survival be recognised as a first step towards solidarity and alliances.