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Is Feminism Alive and Well?
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10476 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
5,235 Words |
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Patricia Summerside
Patricia Summerside is a free-lance writer living in Pierre,
South Dakota. Her articles on social issues have appeared in
several national periodicals. |
RECLAIMING THE MAINSTREAM
Individualist Feminism Rediscovered
Joan Kennedy Taylor
Buffalo : Prometheus Books, 1992
271 pp., $24.95
FEMINISM WITHOUT ILLUSIONS
A Critique Individualism
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991
347 pp., $24.95 cloth, $12.95 paper
BACKLASH
The Undeclared War against American Women
Susan Faludi
New York: Crown Publishers, 1991
552 pp., $24.00
REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN
A Book of Self-Esteem
Gloria Steinem
Boston: Little, Brown, 1992
377 pp., $22.95
American feminism is a "top down" social movement. It has spread through American society from the top down, not as the result of a groundswell. Working-class and underclass feminist individuals and groups do exist, but the impetus and rationale came from the upper and upper-middle classes. And these comparatively privileged classes remain the feminist stronghold the social milieu in which feminist attitudes are a taken-for-granted part of everyone's "mental furniture."
This calls for a bit of caution regarding feminism's impact on other classes. Are America's culture and political elites composed of selfless altruists? Or do they possess a self-interest so enlightened as to be identical with the best interests of the citizenry as a whole... including its least privileged members? Nagging questions like these make many Americans male and female skeptical of feminist claims to speak for all women.
Equal rights or equal outcomes?
Four recent books address the failure of feminism to win universal acceptance. All were
...
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