A hit-and-miss broadside against two centuries of missteps by mainstream feminists.
A professor of women’s and gender studies faults feminism’s focus on White women like Margaret Sanger and Betty Friedan and its neglect of activists from marginalized groups.
Schuller melds history and gender theory in a jeremiad against “white feminism,” which attracts “people of all sexes, races, sexualities, and class backgrounds, though straight, white, middle-class women have been its primary architects.” In a 200-year “counterhistory of feminism,” the author argues fiercely that White, capitalist feminists have furthered their own aims while harming minorities or slighting their contributions. The remedy doesn’t lie in practices such as “liberals’ favorite elixirs: awareness, diversity, equity, and inclusion.” As Schuller notes, “inclusivity within capitalism is a fool’s errand. Its core problem is that it presents capitalism as the deliverer of equality, when capitalism is actually a chief engine of social harm.” The solution consists of an intersectional fight against “racism, sexism, and capitalism” led by those mainstream people feminism has thrown under a bus, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, poor, LGBTQ+, and other Americans. In each chapter, Schuller compares the misguided efforts of a prominent White feminist with the more enlightened work of a marginalized activist. She begins by contrasting Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s opposition to the 15th Amendment with the vision of the poet Frances E.W. Harper, who “called out white women for consistently choosing sex over race.” Schuller ends by comparing Sheryl Sandberg’s capitalist “leaning in” with the “squadding up” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ran as a Democratic Socialist. Each woman in the book has made vital contributions, but some pairings come across as strained efforts to retrofit their subjects’ views to conform to 21st-century academic ideals. For example, Schuller describes the writers Harriet Jacobs and Zitkala-Sa as “intersectional feminists” more than a century before that term came into wide use. This book may have high appeal for readers who share the author’s anti-capitalist sentiments; the unpersuaded are likely to remain so.
A hit-and-miss broadside against two centuries of missteps by mainstream feminists.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64503-689-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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