by Kyla Schuller
Bold Type Books
5/2/2023, paperback
SKU: 9781645036876
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.
Reviews:
"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
"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
"It's a hopeful and refreshing read that invites us to dream bigger and imagination more for feminism." -- Alok Vaid-Menon, author of Beyond the Gender Binary
About the Author:
Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Director of the Women's Global Health Leadership Certificate Program at Rutgers University--New Brunswick. She is the author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century), and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Post Road. She lives in Brooklyn.