Nonfiction About Women To Meet This Moment https://ift.tt/NKorBkf
It’s hard to be an atheistic progressive feminist in the United States these days. I believe that abortion is health care and that a woman has the right to choose whether to become or remain pregnant. I believe that perpetrators of sexual abuse against girls and women should be held legally accountable. And I believe that women belong in the public sphere, wherever power is concentrated and wherever decisions are being made. These beliefs are not held by the current presidential administration, nor by its supporters; if they are held at all, they are held in contempt.
The playbook for Trump 2.0, “Project 2025,” is revanchist. It promotes a return to traditional gender norms according to fundamentalist Christian principles, writes David A. Graham in his guide to Project 2025, The Project. It envisions a world in which men have a “muscular machismo” and women a “demure femininity,” and defines families as those comprising a man, a woman, and gender-conforming children, all preferably Christian.
Stated another way, Project 2025 envisions men providing vigorously and women receiving daintily — preferably from inside the home, with gratitude (smile more, ladies!), and while taking care of multiple children they may or may not have wanted.
To understand this moment, I’ve been reading all the nonfiction I can get my hands on about sexism, misogyny, feminism, and the rights of women. After all, reading can be a form of resistance. I’ve showcased a few of my recent reads below.
I can see why the current administration and other authoritarian regimes dislike sociology as a discipline; it speaks truth to power. Jessica Calarco is a sociologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her latest book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, is the result of years of qualitative research and details how the United States has systematically and unjustly dismantled its social safety net in favor of having women pick up the slack. She calls for institutional change and the establishment of a “union of care.” This is an urgent, scholarly work.
A conversation about feminism can’t be complete without the voices and perspectives of Black women. Mikki Kendall is a Chicago-based author, activist, and cultural critic, and this book of 18 essays is both her criticism of the modern feminist movement and a call to action. This is the book that made me really start to think about “intersectionality” and what it means, because Kendall uses an intersectional framework to explore how the women’s movement has traditionally served the needs of only middle- and upper-class white women. I really liked the essay “The Fetishization of Fierce.”
Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and the author of several books on misogyny. She spent a year immersed in the online “manosphere” to write this broad and disturbing examination of incel culture. Incels are extremists who believe in a massive feminist conspiracy and in a “rigged sexual marketplace.” Bates covers everything from where incels get their ideas to what language they use to how they recruit. The ideology of Men’s Rights Activists, whose “wistful hearkening back to days of strong, male breadwinners and nurturing, supportive, female spouses,” has taken firm root in the modern-day GOP and MAGA movement.
I live in Virginia, the only state in the South without a post-Roe abortion ban. Because the anti-abortion movement is not really about abortion but about controlling and punishing women, and because I don’t believe anti-abortion zealots will stop at abortion, I follow developments on abortion regularly. Valenti has an excellent daily Substack newsletter, Abortion, Every Day, in which she chronicles developments in national and state abortion policy. She also showcases the venality of “conservative” politicians in the setting of abortion and the real stories of women denied abortion or miscarriage care. I’m with Valenti: “I want to live in a country that sees women’s lives as valuable beyond their ability to have babies.” Valenti’s colleague Kylie Cheung, a reporter at Abortion, Every Day, just published a new book, Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans, that I have added to my TBR pile.
As a public health professional who studied maternal and child health, I don’t think we talk enough about the appalling maternal mortality statistics in this country, particularly among Black women. Black women are three times more likely to die during pregnancy than their white peers. And, it seems to me, the dangers of being pregnant while Black are only increasing. This issue is especially stark in light of the overturning of Roe and given the right’s creepy and creeping pronatalism. Written by a board-certified obstetrician/gynecologist, this book is part and parcel of the reproductive justice movement and its values — the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to raise a child in a healthy and safe environment.
I’d never heard of this pamphlet before this year. At 36 pages on my Kindle, it’s a quick read. The author is radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. (Lily Taylor played Solanas in the 1996 film, I Shot Andy Warhol.) In the manifesto, Solanas argues for the extermination of all men and the creation of a female utopia; after all, SCUM apparently stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men.” At times I laughed aloud (“The male has a negative Midas Touch — everything he touches turns to shit”). Several critics assert that the manifesto is political satire and a parody of Sigmund Freud’s theory of femininity. If there can be said to be a feminist literary canon, then this manifesto is a part of it.
As a middle-aged woman, I felt this book, an exploration of ageist misogyny, deep in my brittle bones. When women reach a certain age, we are “neither reproductively useful for conservative definitions, nor feminine enough for social or pornified ones,” writes Smith, but “here we are, still insisting on both our humanity and our womanhood.” This book was written for and about me and all the other women living in this “in-between space.” From one ugly hag to another: It’s nice to feel seen.
I am a generation older than the generation of women referenced in the subtitle of Sophie Gilbert’s Spring 2025 release, Girl on Girl. But this book feels as powerful now as Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth was in the 1990s, when I was in college. Gilbert’s is a cogent cultural critique, and, as a screenwriter, I especially connected with her discussions of women’s representation on television and in film. “Our culture teaches us everything,” she writes. “And what I keep coming back to now is how few cultural representations there still are of women seeking and wielding power.” In the final chapter, she admits to being stunned by the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and echoes the title of Rebecca Solnit’s recent essay collection, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, when she realizes that “Progress for women is not and never will be linear.”
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