What to read about modern feminism

FEMINISTS HAVE a basic belief: that men and women are in all important respects equal. But getting people, especially men, to accept that truth and act on it has been the work of centuries. Feminists have made the case through activism, politics, economics, journalism and art. The work is unfinished. Western feminist theory has divided the movement’s history, and writing about it, into “waves”. In this interpretation feminism began in the late 1840s with the campaign for women’s suffrage in America. The second wave came in the 1960s with the call for women’s “liberation” and equality under the law. A third wave in the 1990s was more rebellious than reformist, more anarchically individualistic than disciplined and legalistic. Some think we are in the midst of a fourth wave, sustained by the internet and social media; the #MeToo movement, which calls out sexual misconduct by powerful men, is its characteristic expression.

Many commentators now regard the “waves” framework as too rigid, too white, too Western and too middle class and too recent (feminism did not begin in the 1840s) to take account of all important aspects of feminist history. The waves framework leaves out thinking about how sex discrimination combines with other sorts that are based on race, class, sexual orientation or disability (a phenomenon sometimes called “intersectionality”). The books we’re recommending will acquaint readers with the classics and with writings by or about women who are not Western, white or rich.

In this anthology, published in 2021, Hannah Dawson, a historian at King’s College London (who has written for The Economist), presents 116 essays, manifestos, poems and other writings by women from between 1405 and 2020. The collection introduces famous Western writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Betty Friedan, as well as women from non-Western cultures. A harrowing description of female circumcision in Egypt and Sudan by Nawal El Saadawi (pictured in the mural above) appears alongside the philosophising of Audre Lorde, a black American lesbian. Ms Dawson provides an illuminating foreword, weaving discussion of her own experiences and beliefs with thoughts on the writers represented in the collection. She gives only the barest details of their lives, trusting the texts to “do the talking”. They are a fine introduction to the diversity of feminist writing.

In this history Lucy Delap, a historian at Cambridge University, analyses the lives and work of feminist activists and writers, including many of those in Ms Dawson’s anthology. Rather than taking a chronological approach, Ms Delap organises her book by themes, such as the “dreams” feminists have, the “spaces” they make and the “actions” they take. The book pays particular attention to movements in which activists participated, such as those advocating socialism or anti-colonialism. Another focus is differences of opinion and background and instances of discrimination within the feminist movement itself. Ms Delap also discusses feminist men. “It is normal, and productive, for any social movement to have many goals and strategies and to mean different things to different people,” she explains.

At a party the (male) host questions Rebecca Solnit about her work, only to interrupt her answer to lecture her on an important new book on the subject. Even though another guest tells him repeatedly that she is the author of that very book, it takes a long time for that to sink in. Ms Solnit, a historian and the author of this collection, is often credited with inventing the word “mansplaining”. She does not use the word here, and is not a fan of it. She enjoys people explaining things to her—if they know what they are talking about. But she worries that women do not enjoy equal rights to explain. In essays on colonialism, social injustice and marriage equality Ms Solnit argues that society applies a discount to what women say and write, by ignoring it, disbelieving it or downplaying its importance. “Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being,” she writes. The right to be taken seriously, Ms Solnit argues here, is a basic human right.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of “Half of a Yellow Sun”, offers a Nigerian perspective on gender stereotypes and the experience of growing up as an (unintentional) feminist. In this book, based on a TED Talk she gave in 2012, Ms Adichie laments the pressure on boys to prove their masculinity and the conditioning of girls to coddle male egos by limiting their own ambitions. She describes how women she knows underplay their successes in front of men. Her least favourite English word, she writes, is “emasculate”. This slim volume, published in 2014, made a big splash. Beyoncé sampled the text, and in 2015 several organisations teamed up to give a copy to all 16-year-old Swedish pupils.

“For a movement that is meant to represent all women, [feminism] often centres on those who already have most of their needs met,” admonishes Mikki Kendall. “Hood Feminism”, which was published in 2020, is “not going to be a comfortable read”, she warns. Her feminism is “rooted in an awareness of how race and gender and class all affect my ability to be educated, receive medical care, gain and keep employment”. Ms Kendall uses her own experiences of family and community in South Side Chicago to describe how the priorities of poor black American women, and of members of other minority groups, differ from those of privileged white women. Worrying about violence and how to feed children is very different from fretting about the number of women in boardrooms. Ms Kendall argues that feminists should champion the rights of sex workers, the unemployed and criminals; “respectability” should not be a criterion for deciding who is entitled to support. Her concern extends to transgender women, whose rights, she says, tend to be ignored by mainstream white feminists.

Not all feminists believe that the cause should be so friendly to assertions by activists about transgender rights. Helen Joyce, a journalist and campaigner (and former editor at The Economist), has become a spokeswoman for British “gender-critical” (GC) feminists. They argue that, although people may choose their gender, they cannot change the sex they were born with. (Detractors malign the GC crowd as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”, or TERFs.) In “Trans” Ms Joyce states her concerns about the influence of “transactivism” and the consequences for individuals and society when “gender self-identification” is allowed to trump biological sex. Self-identified transgender women should not, she argues, automatically get access to facilities, services or sports competitions for females. She worries that “gender-affirmative” medical care, which accepts patients’ self-diagnosis, can be harmful, especially when the patients are children and they are offered irreversible gender surgery. The opposite point of view is put by Judith Butler, sometimes called the “godmother of queer theory”.

In “Invisible Women”, published in 2019, Caroline Criado Perez, a British author, identifies a “gender data gap”. Knowledge, and the institutions and products it shapes, is based on male bodies and minds, she argues. Ms Criado Perez presents examples from the workplace, as well as health care, family life and the media. Cars, phones, clothes, medicines and transport systems are designed using data about men. The results can be deadly. In Britain when women have a heart attack they are 50% more likely than men to be misdiagnosed; they are 17% more likely to die in car crashes. Ms Criado Perez is not the first to notice that men are default humans. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir wrote that women are the second, or “other”, sex, defined by not being male. Ms Criado Perez shows how de Beauvoir’s notion affects many aspects of contemporary life. The newest technologies are not exempt. Artificial intelligence, for example, has gender biases. Does it matter that the data machines learn from skew male? Yes, it does.

Here is The Economist’s annual glass-ceiling index. We’ve written about how young men and women are drifting apart and how their diverging worldviews could affect politics, families and more. Our coverage of sexual politics includes analysis of why nations that fail women fail; how motherhood hurts careers; and why the war on baby girls is winding down. This article looked at how incels and anti-feminists in Asia could worsen the region’s demographic decline. Read our obituary of Betty Friedan, the author of “The Feminine Mystique”, a feminist classic that we described as “rambling and badly written”. And learn why French women no longer wear high heels. ■