Faces Of Feminism: An Activist's Reflections On The Women's Movement (Foundations of Social Inquiry) - Hardcover

Tobias, Sheila

3.87

15 ratings by Goodreads

9780813328423: Faces Of Feminism: An Activist's Reflections On The Women's Movement (Foundations of Social Inquiry)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081332842X ISBN 13: 9780813328423

Publisher: Westview Press, 1997

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As one of the main players in the second wave of feminism, Sheila Tobias returns to Kate Millet's central tenet, sexual politics,” and argues that it can still unite progressive men and women around a common set of goals. Providing a map of a complex terrain, Tobias details generations” of issues, each more radical and therefore harder to tackle than the ones before. She sets the story in two contexts: feminism's own evolving strategies and America's political landscape. Even though her passion for feminism remains, she is not unwilling to critique the sisterhood and herself for failing to see, for example, that not every woman would be a feminist nor every man an enemy. In the heady first years, feminists forgot that deeper even than gender is the liberal/conservative divide in American politics.From the origins of the movement through feminist theory and new scholarship on women, Tobias traces the political history of the second wave and its comeuppance at the hands of Phyllis Schafly's StopERA coincidental with the nation's careering toward the Right. Somehow, feminism survived the 1980s, but by having to fight brush fires throughout the Reagan-Bush presidencies, the movement lost some of its breadth and much of its taste for the mainstream. Because of her activism and her feeling for the period she chronicles, Tobias is at once inside and outside the issues of sexual preference, pornography, the draft, the Mommy Track, comparable worth, affirmative action, reproductive rights, and the challenges of equality versus difference.

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Review:

These days feminism is the new "F" word. Young women who have benefited from the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s shy away from labeling themselves feminists; right-wing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh refer to women's rights activists as "femi-nazis," and women on the right dismiss the need for a woman's movement while reaping its rewards. Despite these setbacks, Sheila Tobias, author of Faces of Feminism: An Activist's Reflections on the Women's Movement, maintains an optimistic attitude.

Tobias starts her review of the feminism's past 30 years with a brief history of its 19th-century underpinnings. This is not the first era in which feminism has splintered into several different camps; the same thing happened in the 1920s after the passage of women's suffrage. Tobias documents many difficult and divisive issues, from pornography to affirmative action, and takes an unflinching look at their failures as well as their achievements. Faces of Feminism is an important and worthwhile book on the state of feminism in the United States today.

About the Author:

Sheila Tobias has been an academic and an activist for over twenty-five years. She has participated in many feminist gatherings, from the Congress to Unite Women in 1970 to the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1993, and is a former board member of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. The author of the best-seller Overcoming Math Anxiety as well as Women, Militarism, and War (with Jean Bethke Elshtain), Tobias now works as a consultant to universities on math and science education, equity issues, and women's studies.

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