The Trouble with White Women
A Counterhistory of Feminism
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3.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
An incisive history of self-serving white feminists and the inspiring women who’ve continually defied them
Women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Sheryl Sandberg are commonly celebrated as leaders of feminism. Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, their white feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized to liberate themselves.
In The Trouble with White Women, Schuller brings to life the two-hundred-year counter history of Black, Indigenous, Latina, poor, queer, and trans women pushing back against white feminists and uniting to dismantle systemic injustice. These feminist heroes such as Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauli Murray have created an anti-racist feminism for all. But we don’t speak their names and we don’t know their legacies. Unaware of these intersectional leaders, feminists have been led down the same dead-end alleys generation after generation, often working within the structures of racism, capitalism, homophobia, and transphobia rather than against them.
Building a more just feminist politics for today requires a reawakening, a return to the movement’s genuine vanguards and visionaries. Their compelling stories, campaigns, and conflicts reveal the true potential of feminist liberation. An Entropy Magazine Best Nonfiction Book of 2020-2021,The Trouble with White Women gives feminists today the tools to fight for the flourishing of all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this passionate and persuasive survey of fault lines within the feminist movement, Schuller (The Biopolitics of Feeling), a professor of women's studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, excoriates the "individualist, status quo–driven paradigm" of mainstream feminism and calls for a true intersectionality that approaches the fight for gender equality "in tandem with the fights for racial, economic, sexual, and disability justice." Schuller's enlightening method is to pair highly critical presentations of influential white feminists with profiles of lesser-known Black, Indigenous, Latina, and trans activists who were addressing the same issues through a different lens. For example, the racist rhetoric of women's suffrage movement leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton is contrasted with poet and abolitionist Frances E.W. Harper's critique of white women for "consistently choosing sex over race," and the eugenic underpinnings of Margaret Sanger's birth control activism are juxtaposed with Dorothy Ferebee's concept of reproductive health access as part of a broader vision of care for Black Americans. Other notable pairings include Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg and Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and anti-trans feminist Janice Raymond and transgender theorist Sandy Stone. Schuller's lucid and accessible analysis of her subjects' lives and careers reveals that long before the concept of intersectionality was formally articulated, there were feminists fighting for it. The result is an essential reckoning with the shortcomings of mainstream feminism.
