From beneficiaries to customers
Consider the following, from the provocation for this special issue of Social Philosophy & Policy:
Social entrepreneurship offers an alternative to traditional charity: Instead of trying to serve the underprivileged as beneficiaries, social entrepreneurs view them instead as customers… . The motivating idea is that market logic disciplines agents to act so as to more efficiently deliver goods and services that add real value to the community. By conceiving of consumers as customers rather than beneficiaries, social entrepreneurs avoid some of the perverse incentives that NGOs and governments face.
Words can be important: calling women who have experienced domestic abuse “survivors” is more empowering and more dignifying than calling them “victims,” even though it is true that those women were victimized. The move from “beneficiaries” to “customers” is not like this, though. It is not a well-motivated relabeling of a person who remains essentially the same, but rather a transformation of a relationship. It is an intriguing idea, given that beneficiaries do not, as a general rule, pay for benefits, while customers, as a general rule, do. How could this work, considering that often the very reason why goods or services are delivered by traditional charities is that those who need the goods or services cannot afford to pay for them?
Perhaps there are some easy cases of services where beneficiaries could afford to pay and would be happy to pay—and yet are not asked to. Nationalized health services might be like this—at least for many people. I would like to know about the hard cases, though. Is social entrepreneurship really an alternative to traditional charity, in any general sense? To make headway on this question, I will take up a particular hard case, namely, women’s refuges, understood as physical spaces offering short- to medium-term accommodation and support for women and their children who have been the victims of rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, or child abuse or who have been subject to coercive control, or who are homeless or at risk of homelessness due to domestic or family violence. Is it possible to turn survivors of domestic abuse in need of refuge from beneficiaries into customers? And even if it is, should we want to? That is to say, this might be an interesting test of the idea of social entrepreneurship, but is it something those who care about women’s refuges should have any interest in? In the next section, I will say a bit more about this hard case and the way the service has been funded historically, drawing on examples from the Australian context.
Women’s refuges
As part of the second-wave feminist movement in Australia, women’s refuges run on feminist principles were established in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth.Footnote 1 The first feminist women’s refuge in Western Australia, Nardine Women’s Refuge, opened in Perth in 1974,Footnote 2 offering services to women and children “homeless due to separation, divorce, irrevocable incompatibility, mental and/or physical violence and cruelty.”Footnote 3
In that year, Australia had a Women’s Adviser to the Prime Minister, who announced that in the following year—1975, designated International Women’s Year by the United Nations—there would be federal funding for the provision of women’s services.Footnote 4 A small group of feminist women in Perth decided to develop a women’s refuge and a women’s health service.Footnote 5 They formed the Women’s Centre Action Group, operating initially on donations and with volunteers, and later becoming an incorporated association and securing funding from both the state government and the federal government.Footnote 6 Historian Suellen Murray writes: “Unlike Nardine’s sister refuge, Elsie’s in Sydney, where women had taken over unoccupied houses, in Perth, the WCAG rented a property for $45 per week, paid for by donations. When Nardine first opened, there was no government funding and all workers were volunteers staffing a 24-hour roster.”Footnote 7
Elsie’s in Sydney was also established in 1974. Women from the Sydney Women’s Liberation movement “accessed and possessed abandoned homes in Glebe, Sydney, Australia. Within a couple of days they had repaired, furnished, and opened Elsie’s place—a safe place for women, away from violent partners and homelessness.”Footnote 8 Neighbors donated household items, food, and toiletry items; local businesses donated refrigerators and washing machines, local produce, and playground equipment.Footnote 9 Elsie’s operated on this model for one year before receiving any government funding.Footnote 10 Implicit in Kelly Lewer’s writing about the history of Elsie’s is the assumption that the refuge could not survive on volunteer labor and donations: “For Elsie’s Place to have longevity or to enter the freezing phase [that is, become permanent/stable] where the refuge would become ongoing, the support of the local, state, and federal governments was essential.”Footnote 11
Jacqui Theobald, writing about women’s refuges in Victoria, comments that the charity-funded services in place before the feminist refuges came along—usually run by religious organizations—could interfere in women’s lives in a way that was “disempowering and autocratic.”Footnote 12 Those organizations also did not publicize what was happening or put domestic violence on the political agenda like the feminist refuges did. Theobald says: “Feminist refuges argued against the welfare-focused charity model and responded with new ways of interpreting and dealing with the problem of domestic violence that were soon sanctioned in policy by Australian state and federal governments.”Footnote 13
This is not to say that feminist refuges refused to operate on charitable funding or resources. As we have already seen, both Nardine and Elsie’s relied upon volunteer labor and donations. Indeed, of the nineteen refuges given federal funding in 1975, “The majority were run on the volunteer labours of women.”Footnote 14 In terms of the economics of refuge provision, feminist refuges were a hybrid of charitable and government provision. Resistance was to the specific charities, usually religious, that offered women refuge as temporary accommodation on a welfare model rather than in accordance with feminist principles.Footnote 15 These principles include that refuges be run “by women for women and their children” and be “committed to social change,” in particular, to changing the power relations between women and men that make domestic violence possible, to providing a supportive environment for women, and “empowering their residents.”Footnote 16
Government funding, however, did not solve all of the problems caused by charities operating on a nonfeminist welfare model. Murray, writing about Nardine, comments that “funding was always precarious, subject to the vagaries of the state and Commonwealth political climates, and even when forthcoming, it was time-limited and only provided minimal remuneration for workers and the costs of running the refuge.”Footnote 17
Furthermore, reliance on government funding was considered complicated. Feminists in the refuge movement generally “believed that the state has a responsibility to provide for women and children” and that government had a “responsibility to meet the specific needs of homeless women,” but they also worried that “accepting government funding … would result in the depoliticization of their work.”Footnote 18 The Victorian Women’s Refuge Group, the umbrella organization for the state’s feminist refuge movement, wrote that “[t]he question of whether government funding of community projects necessarily involves government control of these projects has been a matter of grave concern to many community-based groups.”Footnote 19 One woman previously involved in the refuge movement says that “even though we also thought we deserved funding, or the women who were coming to the refuge deserved resources … we didn’t want to go down that track of just becoming a depoliticised charity.”Footnote 20 “Depoliticization” may have been thought to result from bureaucratic provision for the ongoing symptoms of male violence against women and girls without any plan for stemming its cause. The feminists wanted social change in the power relations between men and women; this meant keeping domestic violence and abuse in the public mind and on the political agenda, not just as an issue of women’s services in need of funding, but as an issue of men’s violence in need of prevention.
One way to remain political was to remain autonomous—as the Victorian shelters did when they refused to disclose their addresses. Theobald argues that “the feminist-inspired campaign” to keep the addresses of women’s refuges secret, even when threatened by a government minister with funding cuts for doing so,Footnote 21 “was … determined from the start to maintain the autonomy of refuges from the state government in order to avoid being forced to operate along the lines of traditional charitable welfare organisations.”Footnote 22 So even though funded by government, the women’s refuges in Victoria were able “to operate … with extraordinarily irregular accountability requirements that included being funded at unknown locations until the late 1980s.”Footnote 23 Secrecy around addresses is remembered mostly as being about the safety of the residents, but in fact was just as much about refusing government scrutiny.Footnote 24 In an interview Theobald conducted with David Green in 2008 about his past role as director of regional services in the Victorian Department of Community Welfare Services, Green says that this kind of autonomy would be impossible today: “There’d be eight levels of authority breathing down the neck of my equivalent.”Footnote 25
Government funding led to the establishment of a large number of women’s refuges. In 1982, eight years after the first Australian feminist-run women’s refuges were established, there were 100 government-funded refuges, and six years later in 1988 there were 190.Footnote 26 Although great improvements have been made to supply over time, as of 2006 demand for refuge services was still greater than the available supply, and additional or specialist resources were still needed (for example, in rural and remote areas, for children, and for women with disabilities).Footnote 27 A similar point was made in 2014: “Success [of the feminist refuge program] continued into the 1990s, although demand never met need, and women’s refuges were never adequately funded to fully meet the needs of all women escaping domestic violence.”Footnote 28
Government funding has its downsides, too, however. First, changes in government can drastically affect funding, which means a government-funded women’s refuge cannot count on being able either to sustain itself or grow. To give one example, generous funding offered by the Women’s Adviser to the Prime Minister in Australia in 1974 for 1975 was affected by a “shock” change in government from the Australian Labour Party to a “new conservative Liberal-National Party coalition” in 1975.Footnote 29 Refuge funding devolved from the nation to the state and some states, including Victoria, covered the shortfall from federal block grants while other states, including Queensland and Western Australia, did not.Footnote 30
Second, there was a potential worry about the values of the government-funded organizations offering services to women. One women’s refuge worker, Michelle Kosky, said in an interview with Murray that she worried about “ideological indoctrination” in women’s refuges, that “women who are subject to domestic violence always pay a price for safety: religious indoctrination or some feminist indoctrination.”Footnote 31 The charities supplying women’s refuges before the second-wave feminist movement offered religious indoctrination; Kosky appears to view the feminists as merely replacing that with feminist indoctrination. And Kosky was not the only one. Lewer quotes journalist Anne Summers as saying, “the perception by the Whitlam [Australian Labour Party] government was that we were a bunch of middle-class women helping other middle-class women get out of marriages.”Footnote 32 If women’s refuges are supplied with government funding, there is an argument that they should be ideologically impartial, and that goes for feminist principles just as much as for religious principles.
In sum, women’s refuges are subject to the usual problems that charities and government-funded services face. Charities rely on donations, which are unpredictable and can fluctuate according to public interest, media coverage, and competition from other worthy causes. Government funding depends on the priorities of the current government and can change abruptly when there is a change in government. Government bureaucracies can be inflexible and unresponsive to immediate needs and fast-changing social circumstances.
Could these problems be avoided by moving the provision of women’s refuges into the market as a form of social entrepreneurship? To succeed in establishing that women’s refuges could be provided as a form of social entrepreneurship, I will take it that (i) the quality of the service would need to be as good as or better than is delivered by either the charitable or government-funded services (including any hybrid of these two) and (ii) the service would need to be sustainable, meaning that it would be reasonably likely to be self-supporting into the future. We can make a start by thinking about the funding models for social entrepreneurship.
Funding social entrepreneurship
In their 2008 book about social entrepreneurs, The Power of Unreasonable People, John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan divide social enterprises into three main business models: the “leveraged nonprofit,” the “hybrid nonprofit,” and the “social business.”Footnote 33 They say that it is characteristic of the leveraged nonprofit that it delivers a public good to those who are the most vulnerable economically and who would not otherwise be able to afford the service, and that it relies on a number of external partners for support.Footnote 34 This describes women’s refuges as they have been offered so far and as described in the previous section.
Hybrid nonprofits, in comparison, deliver goods and/or services to excluded or underserved populations, but recover some of their costs through sales.Footnote 35 For example, the company Aravind in India delivers eye care, including cataract surgeries, “charging wealthier patients more and poorer patients less.”Footnote 36 Sales to wealthier customers subsidize service of poorer customers.
Finally, social businesses are “for-profit entities focused on social missions.” They generate profits, but their aim is to “benefit low-income groups and to grow the social venture by reinvestment, enabling it to reach and serve more people.”Footnote 37
Elkington and Hartigan also surveyed entrepreneurs about their preferred funding sources. These included “tapping the resources of their family and friends,”Footnote 38 public fundraising,Footnote 39 soliciting in-kind contributions,Footnote 40 securing funding from foundations and angel investors,Footnote 41 government funding,Footnote 42 making sales,Footnote 43 franchising,Footnote 44 partnerships and joint ventures,Footnote 45 securing venture capital,Footnote 46 and becoming publicly listed.Footnote 47 The first three of these, as well as securing funding from foundations and government funding, all belong to the leveraged nonprofit model; any one or more may also be utilized to partly support hybrid nonprofits. When we are talking about the profitable part of hybrid nonprofits and about social businesses, then we are interested in the last five as well as in angel investors. The main funding source of interest, though, will be making sales because venture capital sources will need to be repaid and angel investors will need to be offered an exit pathway.
With these points in mind, a more detailed way to redescribe the question of this essay is: Can women’s refuges be turned from leveraged nonprofits into hybrid nonprofits or social businesses? And perhaps more challengingly, in line with the provocation quoted above, can the women who use women’s refuges be viewed as customers rather than as beneficiaries? These are two distinct questions. One is about moving women’s refuges in general from one sector into another, reducing the number of services offered by government or charity and increasing the number offered by the market. The other is about the relationships between the individuals involved with women’s refuges.
We might think of women’s refuges as involving relations between three categories of individual: funders, service providers, and consumers. Who the funders are changes between sectors (individual donors, governments, or customers), but we can assume that the service providers and beneficiaries remain fixed (those who work at the shelters and those who need to use the shelters, respectively, although of course if wages fluctuate between different sectors, that may attract different cohorts of workers). On a strict interpretation, “conceiving of consumers as customers rather than beneficiaries” means that those who need to use the shelters also pay for the shelters. (In the next section, I will reject that strict interpretation.)
Some who have written about social entrepreneurship attempt to distinguish “commercial entrepreneurship” from “social entrepreneurship,” arguing that this is a matter of whether performance is measured by profits or by social value added.Footnote 48 However, this distinction cannot be maintained if the challenge is to make those who would be beneficiaries on a leveraged nonprofit model into customers on a hybrid nonprofit or social business model. Moving away from the leveraged nonprofit model means moving toward thinking about profit or, at least, toward thinking about breaking even, which is the minimum required for sustainability.Footnote 49 Let’s start by considering two quite different companies’ approaches to social good.
JB Hi-Fi
JB Hi-Fi is a consumer electronics and home appliances retailer, selling things like mobile phones, televisions, headphones and speakers, vacuum cleaners, and more. As of mid-2022, there were 199 JB Hi-Fi stores across Australia and fourteen across New Zealand.Footnote 50 JB Hi-Fi runs what they call the “Helping Hands Workplace Giving Program,” which enables employees to make charitable donations through dollar-for-dollar matched payroll deductions. They report 76 percent of their staff—over 6,000 individuals—contribute to this program.Footnote 51
Of JB Hi-Fi’s ten charity partners, only two have an obvious connection to the business in terms of topic. JB Hi-Fi started out as “a single store in the Melbourne suburb of East Keilor, selling specialist Hi-fi equipment and music.”Footnote 52 Their first listed charity partner is The Song Room, a not-for-profit delivering music and arts programs to disadvantaged children,Footnote 53 and their sixth listed charity partner is Support Act, a charity delivering crisis and mental health services specifically to “artists, artist managers, crew and music workers.”Footnote 54 But the other partners all pursue social goods not particularly connected to music or electronics: a foundation to avoid blindness, a youth mental health service, a global anti-poverty organization, an initiative to fight climate change, a charity for companion animals, a youth homelessness organization, and a family violence and homelessness service for women.
JB Hi-Fi is doing many things at once. It is encouraging and facilitating individual philanthropy by its employees, by making donations to the charities within its program tax exempt (deducted from payroll and therefore reducing the employees’ tax-deductible wages or salary) and by offering to match them. It makes donations itself, by matching dollar-for-dollar whatever its employees volunteer. And it is signaling to the wider community that as a company it cares about particular social justice causes and about using some of its profits to advance those causes. But notice that all of this is achieved without the products provided by JB Hi-Fi to its consumers having any connection to the goods secured by its “Helping Hands” program. Take the companion animals charity, the Companion Animal Network (CAN), for example. Their website states: “The Australia CAN movement fights for a world that values the extraordinary bond between people and their pets.” The network’s “members provide rescue, shelter, re-homing, fostering, health care and enrichment services to more than 50,000 animals every year, as well as social programs that advance pet inclusion and welfare in all areas of society.”Footnote 55 Nothing about JB Hi-Fi—either at its inception as a single store focused on music and music-related electronics or in its current incarnation focused on consumer electronics and home appliances with nearly 200 stores in two countries—suggests a connection to companion animals. We might consider this a paradigm example of Corporate Social Responsibility, where ordinary businesses do something to advance the social good above and beyond the goods secured by ordinary business operations, for example, the provision of employment.
Who Gives A Crap
Compare JB Hi-Fi to another example from Australia of a for-profit business oriented toward doing social good. Who Gives A Crap is a subscription toilet paper service, also offering some related products like kitchen towels and tissues, started in 2012. The idea is to deliver boxes of toilet paper, which is advantageous to consumers because it cuts out the constant need to buy a bulky package of toilet paper in the regular grocery shop.
The business founders say on their website: “We started Who Gives A Crap when we learnt that 2.4 billion people don’t have access to a toilet (now 2 billion—yay for progress!).”Footnote 56 They started with a crowdfunding campaign, but it was not for donations—it was for pre-orders.Footnote 57 They exceeded their target and are now a successful business. They donate 50 percent of their profits “to ensure everyone has access to clean water and a toilet within our lifetime,”Footnote 58 and as of September 18, 2023, they had raised $13,378,250.
The connection between the market goods the business produces and the social good it seeks to secure is much clearer in this case; the social good is toilets and connected issues: clean water, sanitation and hygiene, and preventable disease like diarrhea.Footnote 59 The business’s product is toilet paper. This obvious link between the product and the cause helps informed consumers to keep the business’s dual purpose in mind. Of course, some people might just like the product; it has uniquely fun packaging compared to any other brand and is often stacked up in trendy café and restaurant bathrooms, so it is likely to have brand recognition exceeding knowledge of its social aims. But those consumers who look into it might then become loyal to the brand precisely because they support its social purpose. That means informed consumers of Who Gives A Crap are hybrid between being “customers,” in the sense they would be of any other companies they buy goods and services from, and being “donors,” in the sense that they would be to any purely charitable enterprises they support.
Because there is no clear connection between JB Hi-Fi and most of its charity partners, sales made by the retailer are not a secure and sustainable route to the social goods provided by any one of those charities. JB Hi-Fi might take a new vote from its employees at any time and change the list of programs it supports. Customers of JB Hi-Fi might prefer it over other electronics retailers for the generic reason that it is committed to doing social good, but their loyalty is less likely to be tied to a specific cause, such as companion animals. The difference between JB Hi-Fi and Who Gives A Crap is what we might consider the difference between Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship, namely, the connection between the goods the business produces and the social good it pursues.Footnote 60 While it is possible in principle that a large company or corporation commit some percentage of its profits to women’s refuges as a permanent partner, such that women’s refuges could be provided on a Corporate Social Responsibility model, I will take the insecurity of any such partnership to fail the requirement I stipulated above for moving women’s refuges into the market, namely, that “the service would need to be sustainable, meaning that it would be reasonably likely to be self-supporting into the future.”
I will focus, instead, on Social Entrepreneurship. In the next section, we will consider applying the Who Gives A Crap business model to women’s refuges.
Why not hybrid consumers, too?
The Who Gives A Crap business model establishes that an individual can be both “customer” and “donor.” If we can apply that model to women’s refuges then we have added a market element to the “funder” category in the three-place relation of women’s refuge provision of funders, service providers, and consumers. Funders need not be government departments or individual philanthropists with deep pockets; they might be an aggregate of ordinary consumers. Can we similarly hybridize the “consumer” category, adding a market element? That is, can we make the “beneficiaries” of women’s shelters into “customers,” too?
All customers are beneficiaries in the sense that the transaction gives them something that they want—otherwise, they would not engage in it. But not all beneficiaries are customers, because not all beneficiaries pay for the goods they receive. In the Who Gives A Crap example, the individual who buys the toilet paper because they support the cause simultaneously takes two roles: customer and donor. The obvious parallel would be to ask whether individual beneficiaries can take two roles: beneficiary and customer. But this runs into an immediate obstacle. The women most likely to need women’s services are simply not in a position to pay for them. Murray writes of the establishment of Nardine in Western Australia: “Class was one factor that became an important area of difference. Wealthier women were much more likely to have access to alternative accommodation and so Nardine’s residents tended to be drawn from poorer economic backgrounds.”Footnote 61 There is also the issue that financial control is a frequent element of domestic abuse, meaning that even women who are in principle wealthier may not have access to funds.
That does not mean there could be no women’s shelters running as businesses; perhaps financially independent women not at risk of homelessness nonetheless would benefit—after an experience of rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, or coercive control—from being in a community of women who have suffered similar experiences and from the therapeutic services that a particular refuge offers. Such women would be perfectly able to pay for the service. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there are enough such women for at least one refuge in any large city to be able to operate for profit in this way. (And let’s set aside the question of who should pay, which we might be tempted to answer with the man who perpetrated those crimes against her or the state, on his behalf, if he won’t.) Still, it is completely implausible that women’s shelters in general could be run on this model as ordinary businesses charging women for short- to medium-term accommodation and support services. If the requirement to count as “social entrepreneurship” is strictly that those who would be beneficiaries on a charitable or government-funded model become customers, then that is a way of offering women’s refuges that would exclude the very women who need the service the most.
So much the worse for that strict requirement, I think. Bringing women’s refuges into the market sector does mean creating customers, but the customers and the beneficiaries need not be the same people. On the Who Gives A Crap model, they are not: one group buys toilet paper (customers), another gets toilets and sanitation (beneficiaries). I cannot see any principled reason to refuse to classify a social business as Social Entrepreneurship simply because it does not make people in need pay.Footnote 62 Instead, let’s try something a little more creative with the hybrid role idea. Rather than think about the beneficiary becoming a customer, let’s think about (a) adding new customer/donors and (b) adding new customer/beneficiaries. If we can do this, then we will have established that it is possible to bring women’s refuges into the market sector, without running into the problem of pricing out all those women who need women’s refuges the most.
Merchandise and movement-building
Let’s start with adding new customer/donors. As toilet paper is to toilets and sanitation for Who Gives A Crap, x is to women’s refuge provision. The question, then, is what is x?
One way that musicians often supplement their incomes is by selling merchandise. Fans may pay a ticket price for a live event, but that is split with the venue; profits from T-shirts and caps, on the other hand, all go to the band.Footnote 63 The merchandise is tightly connected with the band’s central product. The central product is its music, but a way to get more people to hear and potentially become fans of the music is to increase awareness of the band, which can be done through merchandise. One person wears a faded looking T-shirt proclaiming “Frogstomp,” another person wonders what “frogstomp” means and looks it up online, thus encountering the 1990s Australian grunge band Silverchair for the first time. Fans of bands generally like to wear the band’s merchandise because that helps them to communicate their tastes and connect with those who share them.
The same strategy has been used successfully by political activists. The British women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen, for example, runs the online store Standing For Women. Keen’s website reads: “We love donations, but what we really love is when you become part of the campaign. We have a strategy to raise funds and consciousness while we do it! We have a range of merchandise with profits going toward specific actions. #BeTheBillboard.”Footnote 64 This slogan “Be The Billboard” means that women should wear T-shirts, sweatshirts, socks, badges, or lanyards; carry bags or umbrellas; and/or use stationary, mugs, or drink bottles that bear the political messages of the Standing For Women campaign.Footnote 65
A green round-neck T-shirt with “woman” spelled out in sparkling green diamantes across the bust is priced at £35.00.Footnote 66 That would be a relatively expensive T-shirt (nearly $70 AUD or $45 USD) if only a T-shirt. But there is enormous variation in the pricing of clothing when considering only the quality of the materials used in their construction; much more depends on the brand and the quality of the garment’s construction. A cropped cotton jersey T-shirt with a diamante “G” on it is currently listed at the online Gucci store for $730 AUD.Footnote 67 People pay for Gucci because they like Gucci or want the signaling effects of wearing Gucci, not because the Gucci T-shirt is intrinsically worth $730 while a similarly shaped 100 percent cotton H&M T-shirt (albeit sans diamantes) is intrinsically worth $14.99.Footnote 68 For women active in the movement to reclaim women’s sex-based rights, the motivation to “Be The Billboard” and wear their politics may be just as strong as the motivation of any person to wear any particular clothing brand or the T-shirt of their favorite band. Like the customer of Who Gives A Crap, these women are at once customers, who have their own reasons for wanting the merchandise, and donors, in being at least partly motivated to buy the merchandise out of a desire to support the political cause.
Keen uses the funds raised through the sale of this merchandise to fund her political activities, which include travel and security for Let Women Speak events all around the United Kingdom and more recently through the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. She is without doubt the most prominent figure in the gender-critical feminist movement—although she has repudiated the label “feminist” for herself, preferring “women’s rights campaigner”—and has the most watched interview on the popular YouTube channel Triggernometry, at over 1.5 million views.Footnote 69 That is to say, her strategy is working, at least in terms of movement-building and visibility. (Whether it is working in terms of concrete political outcomes such as having laws overturned remains to be seen.)
Could something like this work for women’s shelters? Imagine that after the conflict between sex and gender identity is resolved, rather than bringing her activism to an end, Keen continues to livestream and hold in-person events about various important issues facing women understood as a sex class. For example, suppose she turns to raising awareness about domestic violence and raising funds, through the sale of merchandise, for women’s shelters. Suppose that any woman or women’s group did this, that is, build an activist movement for a specific women’s liberation issue that funds its activities through the sale of merchandise proclaiming the movement’s goals. This is basically the Who Gives A Crap model applied to feminism: the sale of products to customers/donors, from which profits are put to the dual use of (a) providing services to women in need and (b) sustaining the ability of the business/organization to keep doing this into the future. If Who Gives A Crap is a social business in Elkington and Hartigan’s categorization, then women’s shelters funded on this model should be, too.
This should not be taken to suggest that any such organization is likely to be profitable and self-supporting right away, as Who Gives A Crap managed to be. Who Gives A Crap filled a genuine gap in the market for aesthetically pleasing toilet rolls—individually wrapped in fun printed wrappers, with different print collections throughout the year—offered on a subscription service and delivered straight to your home. T-shirts, hats, and pens do not do that: they compete with a million other such items. There are any number of activist causes attempting to partly fund their work through the sale of T-shirts and other merchandise without having much luck. (At a recent activist conference I went to with about forty attendees, there were three tables of merchandise offered by at least three different sellers; one told me she only sold two T-shirts.) This is the kind of approach that is only likely to work at scale, and perhaps more likely to work with an umbrella movement (such as Keen’s) that can turn its attention to different specific projects. It might be that in the beginning the organization needs to rely on a mixture of funding: profits from the sale of merchandise and traditional donations of money and other in-kind contributions. For example, a feminist artist or graphic designer may offer to create T-shirt designs as a volunteer, so that the costs of hiring a designer can be avoided.
Mutual aid associations
Let’s now turn to the idea of adding new customer/beneficiaries. Historically, mutual aid associations (alternatively, “mutual benefit societies”) allowed members to pool their resources in a form of insurance, so that if a member got sick or needed support that would otherwise exceed their capacity to pay, they could draw from a common pool. As Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi tell the history, “mutual aid societies [rather than simple self-interest] also relied on reciprocity, solidarity, and feelings of mutual concern.”Footnote 70 It is thought that in 1920 in America, 18 million people—30 percent of the adult population—belonged to a mutual aid society.Footnote 71 For example, the Ladies of the Maccabees was a women-only mutual aid society that offered maternity insurance, among other things.Footnote 72 Such associations rely crucially on solidarity between members, which suggests they will be most successful between people who are marginalized or otherwise beleaguered, such as persistent religious and political minorities or peoples who have experienced serious historical injustice.
This approach opens up the possibility of funding women’s refuges on a model that is affordable to many women, even those on low incomes, because a service funded by many more people than will need to use it is a service that can be funded by small contributions from all rather than large contributions by a few. The fact that these associations offer welfare services outside of government would be appealing to the second-wave feminists who worry about losing autonomy in how women’s shelters are run. The reliance of mutual benefit societies on solidarity between members would also obviously be desirable to the feminist movement more generally, which seeks to build and sustain solidarity between women.
The problem, however, is that without adjustment, this approach still threatens to exclude the women most in need of the services. As mentioned already, some perpetrators of domestic abuse control the family finances, so women do not have the independent means necessary to sign up to such a scheme. Women early in their marriages or relationships are unlikely to believe that they need such a service; most are in complete shock the first time their partner hits them and many make excuses that it was a one-off that will not happen again. So they would not sign up to such a service except as a way of supporting other women, making contributions that they believe they will never need to recover. So long as there is that solidarity, however, this is no obstacle to the approach. So long as they sign up believing this is something other women need, they will still have access to support when they turn out to need it themselves.
One way of staying within this funding model but addressing the problem of excluding those who cannot pay is to allow transfer of membership advantages to other women. Thus, women could join the association and pay membership dues, on the understanding that they would have one “transfer” available at any time in the course of their membership (or as many transfers as they have memberships). All that needs to happen is that a woman who is part of the association learns of a woman in need and transfers her membership advantages to that woman. She might prefer to do this only with friends and relatives; she might be happy to do this with any woman in need. There is still a problem to solve, though, which is how to connect women in need to women with memberships. That could be fairly easily facilitated by the women’s refuges themselves, in much the same way that cafes coordinate “paying it forward” coffee credits for homeless people. This approach avoids the difference-making problem that plagues charities, where people do not see the effects of their donations. Transferring membership advantages to a specific woman in need of women’s refuge provision is a way of making a clear and tangible difference. The more feminist solidarity there is between women, the more funding such associations are likely to have, and so the more resources there would be for a women’s refuge to draw on in providing support to women in need.
Should this be considered to have successfully moved women’s refuges into the market? Some might think not, because “membership fees” sound like a redescription of “donations,” and that is just the charitable model all over again. But insurance is generally considered a market product, and car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, and so on are big businesses. Why not specifically feminist insurance, then—against domestic violence, rape, homelessness, economic precarity in old age, or any of the other forms of violence and marginalization that women are vulnerable to? The only difference is that for these other types of insurance, they are for the insurance-holder alone, so they cannot be transferred. But there is no reason in principle why an insurance company could not offer, for example, double policies: one for the policyholder and one to be gifted out. The greater range of uncertainties should be expected to affect the price, but that does not mean there is not some price at which this product could be offered.
A more serious challenge comes from the combination of (a) not knowing exactly what the demand is for women’s shelters, given that it seems supply has never succeeded in meeting demand, and (b) not knowing how many women would be likely to join such mutual benefit associations. This creates a problem especially for the viability of the business model in terms of making a profit. There is a reason why transfer of insurance—car insurance, health insurance, life insurance—is not offered, which is that there is always going to be someone who needs it and the profit model of insurance companies relies on people being willing to pay to insure themselves against risks that will probably not materialize. If 1,000 Australians were to sign up for health insurance against serious disease and allowed to transfer their insurance to another person at any time (even if limited to one transfer only), then a “middle-man” health charity could easily ensure that 1,000 transfers were made, and so 1,000 claims were put in. The company would soon go bankrupt.
To argue convincingly that the mutual benefit association with transfer of membership would be a viable approach financially, we would need more empirical information about rates of domestic violence and rates of women likely to take out memberships as well as how many memberships they would each be likely to take out. But presumably, there is some ratio—whether more in the ballpark of 10:1 or 1,000:1—at which membership could outpace need and so securely provide women’s shelters without the business providing it going bankrupt.
A benefit of each of these two approaches—merchandise and movement building and mutual aid associations—is that they allow ideological disagreements to be resolved with pluralism in services offered. One major disagreement among feminists at the moment is whether women’s refuges (and other women’s services) should continue to be offered as single-sex or instead reconceived to be offered as single-gender identity. That is, should a women’s shelter admit only biological females, regardless of their gender identity, or should it admit only people who identify as women, whatever their biological sex? This issue has been enormously divisive, with those on the side of sex arguing that women will start self-excluding from the services if those services start admitting males and those on the side of gender identity arguing that it is discriminatory against trans-identified males (transwomen) to exclude them from women’s services. Instead of charities or governments having to take a side in this disagreement, inevitably leaving one group of women furious, the two market models outlined above allow women with different feminist commitments to support women’s refuges with different inclusion/exclusion policies, whether that is through choices about which movement’s merchandise to buy or about which mutual aid societies to join.
Is the social price too high?
Let’s go back to the first approach, where a business wants to deliver social goods and funds its activities through the sale of a related product. In the case of delivering the service of a women’s refuge, I suggested the model of feminist movement merchandise, following a similar funding model to that by which women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen funds her political activities.Footnote 73 Supposing that this funding approach would work, are there any broader considerations that would tell against adopting it?
I think at least presumptively there are. With increasing political polarization, signaling of one’s politics becomes more likely to create conflict in the public sphere. We all have an interest in a public sphere full of amicable interactions that do not depend on whether we have the same political views. Just imagine how much your friendly banter with the barista at your local café might change were she wearing an Extinction Rebellion T-shirt and you had recently missed an important work meeting because Extinction Rebellion activists were holding up traffic on a road along your route.
There also tends to be a hegemonic view and an “everyone else” view. For example, in Australia in 2023 “Yes” voters on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament referendum confidently wore T-shirts and pins, but “No” voters generally did not. The same was true for the “Yes” campaign for Equal Marriage in Australia in 2017 and is true for any number of left-wing political causes such as indigenous sovereignty, climate action, and trans rights. This means conflict can be created in one direction, with those comfortable enough to proclaim their politics oblivious to the discomfort and in some cases offense they are causing in everyone else.
In my view, it would be better for all of us to de-politicize public space than to politicize it ever further.Footnote 74 But encouraging the movement of women’s refuges out of the charitable and government sectors and into the market sector through the first route I proposed leans into that further politicization.
This might seem like a bizarre point. So long as we agree with the goals of a campaign to raise awareness about domestic violence and provide women-only domestic violence refuges (and other types of women’s services), why should we worry about the discomfort of the anti-feminists who do not support this project? And couldn’t we make the same point for all the examples just given: so long as we think we should work for indigenous sovereignty, against climate change, and for trans rights, isn’t the public signaling of these commitments uncontroversially good rather than bad?
In an article I wrote nearly ten years ago titled “Unethical Consumption and Obligations to Signal,” I argued that signaling effects can solve the difference-making problem that otherwise confronts act-utilitarianism. In brief, that problem is that actions that intuitively seem wrong because they contribute to harmful outcomes cannot yet be said to cause harmful outcomes, because individually they make no difference. It is only together with others’ similar actions that harmful outcomes are caused. The first step in my argument was that “there are some morally important ends we can pursue only by acting collectively, and that … fact alone gives us reason to come together.”Footnote 75 The second step was that an individual who “recognize[s] that there is something people could do together about the harms, but believe[s] that others would not be willing to get together and do it … ought, at the very least, not to allow herself to be a reason for others to believe that no one is willing to get together and act.”Footnote 76 She can accomplish this fairly easily through signaling her conditional commitment to cooperate with others, which “may be as simple as wearing a T-shirt printed with a particular message.”Footnote 77 The effects of an individual’s signal will depend on “her social status, charisma, perceived intelligence, perceived virtue, social attractiveness, and other factors.”Footnote 78 The third step was that this creates a specifically consequentialist justification for actions that are normally considered as having only expressive value.Footnote 79 The T-shirt is not just expressing your politics, but rather taking a first step in securing collective action by letting others know that you would be willing to act together. The same point can be applied to my first approach above; wearing the women’s movement T-shirt not only helps fund women’s services and signals support for feminist causes, but it also takes a step toward coordinating women into collective action in women’s interests.
While I still think it is true that signaling can be a contribution toward collective action, I now see it as a problem with my argument that I did not give enough consideration to disagreement over what we each want the world to be like, and so which collective actions we would like to be part of. I did not balance the costs of a society of oppositional and conflicting signaling against the benefits of raising the probability for collective action in the pursuit of ends of which I approved morally. From a nonpartisan perspective, it is either everyone signaling the world they want or it is no one. So the question must be, considering everything your political enemies want and what the world would look like when we’re all bedecked in proclamations of our favorite causes—many of which, perhaps, others will consider to be good or neutral even if not their own choices, but some of which they will consider offensive or even hateful—should the political merchandise route still be endorsed?
The first thing to note is that the tendency already mentioned for there to be a hegemonic view and an “everyone else” view will tend to suppress the political signaling likely to cause the greatest magnitude of discomfort or offense. To give an anecdotal example, I am surely one of the most committed gender-critical feminists around, and yet even I would not dare to wear a “TERF”Footnote 80 T-shirt outside of special contexts like protests or public events. (I certainly would not just wear one around in Melbourne or on the University of Melbourne campus where I work.) So it is only when one’s political cause rises to the level of mutual toleration, if not outright acceptance of disagreement, that this issue will really arise. And at that point, oppositional and conflictual signaling is likely not socially divisive enough to be a reason for everyone to agree that it is better for no one to signal.
Furthermore, there are things we could do to protect social cohesion. We could develop social norms that scaffold certain places being “political-messaging-free zones,” for example, classrooms and workplaces. Those more intimately interpersonal spaces could discourage overtly political clothing and accessories, while other public spaces like supermarkets and restaurants would not need to.
Finding ways to communicate our support for social justice causes—especially when that literally funds the advancement of those causes—does appear to be more important than preserving all public space as politically neutral space where people can interact just as people, without transparency about their moral and political views. We can take the vices of moral and political signaling seriously,Footnote 81 while still acknowledging the benefits that signaling can bring.
Should feminists support the market provision of women’s refuges?
This essay has been an exercise in taking up an intriguing suggestion and seeing how far it is possible to run with it in a specific case. If you are a libertarian, you might be interested in my proposals because moving the provision of services from the government to the market helps to reduce the size of government. If you are a social entrepreneur, you might be interested in the prospects for a social business aimed at providing the particular service of women’s refuge. But what if you are just a feminist, like me, and all you are really interested in is the women who need refuge getting refuge?
To that end, we must ask: Which funding model would provide the number of sufficiently high-quality women’s refuges that meets current demand or that gets closest out of the three funding models to meeting current demand? Which funding model makes the delivery of women’s refuges the most sustainable into the future? Do any of the funding models do anything to address the cause of the need for women’s refuges (that is, male violence) rather than only addressing the need? Is there any reason not to use a combination of two or more models?
The answer to these questions seems to depend very much on the country and historical moment. If there is a strong grassroots women’s movement, as gender-critical feminism (some say “sex-realist feminism”) looks set to become, then there may be adequate consumer demand to secure women’s services on the market models presented here and/or there may be sufficient donations to secure women’s services on a charitable model. But if there is less social interest in women’s issues and less appetite for supporting women’s causes, then government funding may be the better option. Alternatively, a government might lose interest in women’s services and cut funding, shifting the onus back onto individuals as donors and/or customers. Government funding may be better from the perspective of a feminist who cares that the full cost of paying for the effects of male violence does not fall on women (the most likely donors).
As far as I can see, no funding model is intrinsically better from the perspective of a feminist who just cares that the victims of domestic abuse have a place to go.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Kate Phelan and Shang Long Yeo for helpful discussion, as well as to the other contributors to this volume.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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