Who's Afraid of Feminism?: Seeing Through the Backlash - Softcover

3.45

20 ratings by Goodreads

9781565843851: Who's Afraid of Feminism?: Seeing Through the Backlash

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565843851 ISBN 13: 9781565843851

Publisher: The New Press, 1997

The progress in women’s rights brought about by the feminist activism of the 1960s through the early 1980s is today confronted with a major political backlash. For Who’s Afraid of Feminism?, editors Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell have commissioned new work by Carol Gilligan, Carolyn Heilbrun, and a distinguished, international group of feminist thinkers to explore the diverse territories that feminist thought and activism have affected over recent years, and the new questions that have arisen during that process.

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Review:

Feminism was never intended to be monolithic or totalitarian, but all too often it gets cast that way. Who's Afraid of Feminism? takes a weighty, tough-minded look at backlash within--and outside of--the feminist movement, and its international contributors don't pull punches. Margaret Walters delivers scathing commentary on the mirror-image melodrama of Camille Paglia and Catharine MacKinnon squaring off over pornography. She notes dryly that the demonizing rhethoric spouted in this fight "offers far more excitement than the slow slog to get a better deal for women in the workplace, at home, in politics, or the equally slow struggle to explore the ambiguities of our own sexual feelings..." Susan Heath puts the lie to advances made by lesbians that are too often shredded by day-to-day homophobic realities. The book is no dirge, however, but a healthy shake-up that carefully examines and in some instances affirms what feminist values are and how they've sped and slowed our journey. --Francesca Coltrera

About the Author:

Ann Oakley is a professor of sociology at the University of London. Her previous books include Gender on Planet Earth and Experiments in Knowing (both published by The New Press), The Men’s Room, The Captured Womb, Subject Women, Becoming a Mother, Woman’s Work, The Sociology of Housework, and Sex, Gender and Society.

Juliet Mitchell is a psychoanalyst and currently A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She is also a university lecturer at Cambridge University and Fellow of Jesus College.

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