The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

by Kyla Schuller, Brittney Cooper Narrated by Christine Lakin, Mela Lee

Overview

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. The Trouble with White Women gives feminists today the tools to fight for the flourishing of all.

Editorial Reviews

JANUARY 2022 - AudioFile

After Mela Lee’s enthusiastic narration of the foreword, Christine Lakin’s pitch-perfect performance is a great fit for this political exposé. Sounding intelligent and inviting, her spot-on interpretations and astute phrasing gently signal the scholarly and moral underpinnings of the author’s insights. Kyla Schuller, who teaches women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Rutgers, shows how the self-serving and exclusionary aspects of the Women’s Movement have consistently refused to address the rights of women of color and women with nonstandard gender identifications. More broadly, her research describes many tragic examples of America’s still powerful caste system. This audiobook, buoyed by Lakin’s top-shelf narration, shows how courageous Black women refused to be silent when mainstream gender equality initiatives sacrificed minority women's rights to advance white women’s interests. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/19/2021

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. Agent: Ed Maxwell, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

"Kyla Schuller turns her razor-sharp focus and intimate understanding of the intersection of race and gender to some of the giant figures of white feminism – and their contemporaries who challenged them from the get-go. From Frances Harper and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan, Schuller reminds us that even from its beginnings white feminism has seen significant and sustained challenges from Black, Indigenous and other women of color. With characteristic originality and insight, Schuller offers a gripping contribution to the critical literature on white feminism, and in the process delivers a masterclass not only on how the personal is indeed political but on how the specific is universal." 
 —Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears, Brown Scars

“An indispensable gift and a profoundly illuminating resource. Schuller is an expert at articulating the malignant disjunctions and hypocrisies of our culture with stunning craft, style, insight, and narrative suspense. One of the most essential writers and scholars of our time.”
 —T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“From a brilliant human being and outstanding scholar, a great model for how to make a takedown a work of great art, how devotion to the truth can cut into a dominant narrative not just like a knife but with the hard wiring of real love.”
 —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity, Sick: A Memoir, and other books

“Clarifying, challenging, exquisitely researched and argued, The Trouble With White Women will give you so much to sit with and to revisit—it prepares us to do the hard, essential labor of dismantling white feminism.”
 —Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even

“[T]his is a timely and essential piece that should find a wide audience in both public and academic libraries.”—Booklist

"[A] passionate and persuasive survey of fault lines within the feminist movement... 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.”—Publishers Weekly, *Starred review*

"Schuller’s highly recommended feminist counterhistory is inspiring, and her arguments persuasive. She excels in letting the voices and lived experiences of women of color, trans women, and otherwise marginalized women come to the fore."—Library Journal, *Starred review*

“The Trouble with White Women is a truly necessary book, especially in the context of conservatives’ redoubled war on history.”—The Progressive

“The most adept historian is one who can transform carefully mined nuggets of archival material into compelling, if not piquant, prose. Schuller is a gifted storyteller, her counterhistory equal parts writerly craft and scholarly diligence…The Trouble With White Women is a welcome addition to the feminist canon. Undertaking the kind of critical labor necessary for engendering a truly liberatory feminism, Kyla Schuller is doing the work.”—Joan Morgan, The New York Times Book Review

“[A] passionate and persuasive survey of fault lines within the feminist movement.”—Publishers Weekly, PW Pick of the Week

“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. The Trouble with White Women gives feminists today the tools to fight for the flourishing of all.”—Entropy, BEST OF 2020-2021: NONFICTION BOOKS

“It's a hopeful and refreshing read that invites us to dream bigger and imagination more for feminism.”—Alok Vaid-Menon, CNN Best Books of 2021

“The brilliance of Schuller’s work is that she reveals that white feminism isn’t simply a politics, rather it is a mandate of a biopolitics…Schuller offers a refreshing contrast to a particular strand of 21st-century.”—Marcie Bianco, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The Trouble with White Women disputes hegemonic depictions of American feminism and encourages readers to think critically about the types of activism, organizing, and resistance needed to challenge systems of oppression.”—RGWS: A Feminist Review

Library Journal

★ 10/01/2021

Schuller (women's, gender, and sexuality studies, Rutgers Univ.; The Biopolitics of Feeling) juxtaposes white feminism (as it has been practiced in the United States since the 19th century) with the intersectional feminism originating from women of color. She writes that white feminists have historically focused solely on gender and been willing to sacrifice marginalized women if they deem it politically expedient, often making gains at the expense of women of color. Schuller's counterhistory highlights activists of color including Zitkala-Sa, Pauli Murray, and Sandy Stone. Notably, she discusses Stone's trans activism and the coalition-building that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has practiced in Congress. Schuller makes the case that women of color have always faced multiple oppressions and she argues that concerns of gender discrimination cannot be divorced from discrimination of the basis of race, class, or disability. She offers the examples of Betty Friedan and Sheryl Sandberg to demonstrate that feminism's work is not achieved when one white woman attains parity with other white men. Schuller concludes that feminism, as practiced by women of color, is a movement for social, economic, sexual, and political justice, and white feminism must recede. VERDICT Schuller's highly recommended feminist counterhistory is inspiring, and her arguments persuasive. She excels in letting the voices and lived experiences of women of color, trans women, and otherwise marginalized women come to the fore.—Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID

JANUARY 2022 - AudioFile

After Mela Lee’s enthusiastic narration of the foreword, Christine Lakin’s pitch-perfect performance is a great fit for this political exposé. Sounding intelligent and inviting, her spot-on interpretations and astute phrasing gently signal the scholarly and moral underpinnings of the author’s insights. Kyla Schuller, who teaches women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Rutgers, shows how the self-serving and exclusionary aspects of the Women’s Movement have consistently refused to address the rights of women of color and women with nonstandard gender identifications. More broadly, her research describes many tragic examples of America’s still powerful caste system. This audiobook, buoyed by Lakin’s top-shelf narration, shows how courageous Black women refused to be silent when mainstream gender equality initiatives sacrificed minority women's rights to advance white women’s interests. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-08-17
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173128645
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	770,135

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