Feminism for Good Girls

As is the case with most political movements, there's always been a current of quasi-religious fervor within American feminism, so it seems fitting that Rory Dicker, a lecturer in women’s studies at Vanderbilt, introduces A History of U.S. Feminisms with her own conversion story. As a teenager, Dicker was a “good girl” who, thanks to the 1980s backlash against feminism, “didn’t really know what the f-word was,” though she “recognized it as something dangerous.” She was in her mid-20s, immersed in graduate studies focused on women writers, when she began to understand the facts of women’s history and to see the real difference feminism had made in the quality of American women’s lives. Only then did she call herself a feminist.

Dicker has found that many of her students today are as uninformed—and misinformed—as she once was. She reports that they’re often “startled” to find that their teacher, “a petite white heterosexual woman who smiles and has been known to wear lipstick,” is a feminist. This book essentially offers the same remedial instruction in women’s history that she gives them. Addressing the reader, she makes no bones about her mission: “When they discover the inequalities women faced in the past, students can’t help calling themselves feminists; I hope reading this brief history of feminism in the United States has a similar effect on you.”

In other words, if you’ve ever debated the virtues of lesbian separatism or had a subscription to Bitch magazine, you are not the target audience for this book. Nevertheless, readers who are perfectly comfortable branding themselves with the f-word may find this concise, elegantly written history enjoyable, while newbies will find it a revelation. Dicker starts by tackling the difficult job of defining feminism, which she sees as linked to all movements for liberation. She endorses bell hooks’ idea that the “ideology of domination” is the core evil that feminism confronts. “According to hooks,” writes Dicker, “society needs to be transformed so that all systems of domination, including not just patriarchy but racism, imperialism and capitalism, are eradicated.”

The book then goes on to provide a highly condensed account of the three “waves” of American feminism. The first wave grew out of women’s involvement with the anti-slavery movement and ultimately won women the vote in 1920. The second began in the 1960s and won important legal protections for women, including abortion rights, before it was flattened by the rise of the Christian right. The current third wave seeks to rebound from the losses of the last three decades. It’s also characterized by a greater awareness of global women’s issues, as well as the dubious “power feminism” of such figures as Katie Roiphe.

Dicker makes her history engaging by focusing on key personalities, particularly in her discussion of the first wave. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth, among others, are portrayed as the contentious characters they were, rather than as historical icons. The outrageous Victoria Woodhull gets plenty of space, including her sexual manifesto: “I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may love, to love as long, or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please.”

The complex, sometimes bitter relationship between anti-racist and anti-sexist activism in the U.S. is explored in a clear, nuanced fashion. First-wave feminists were radicalized in the abolitionist movement, yet they were overtly racist in both their rhetoric and their organizing practices. Similarly, many second-wave activists came out of the civil rights movement but created a version of feminism that often ignored the needs of poor women and women of color. The historical conflict is interesting to contemplate in light of the Clinton-Obama primary brawl. Clearly, we’ve been here before.

Dicker states in the first chapter of A History of U.S. Feminisms that her intent is to provide only a bare-bones survey of American feminism, encouraging readers to do further research on their own. Still, some of the book’s omissions are surprising. For instance, Dicker gives substantial attention to the concerns of women of color, but she omits any mention of Angela Davis, who has been a key figure in shaping ideas about race and gender. Anarchist Emma Goldman, a revered renegade of first-wave feminism, gets only a brief reference in connection to early efforts to legalize contraception.

In the book’s final chapter, Dicker identifies the future challenges for feminism, especially issues of economic inequality and violence against women, and the continuing battle with religious extremism. Given her definition of feminism as a battle against “the ideology of domination,” she might also have expressed concern about the way mainstream feminism has been co-opted into the service of established power. Bush, for example, has falsely sold his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a defense of women’s rights. Worse yet, Hillary Clinton, touted as a feminist heroine, felt no need to express solidarity with the brutally oppressed women of Iran. Instead, she threatened to “obliterate” them. What kind of sisterhood is that?