THE TROUBLE WITH WHITE WOMEN

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.