The Trouble with White Women
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The counterhistory of feminism offers an essential rubric for differentiating white feminism in woke masquerade from those truly intersectional efforts to change the structure of power, not only its face. When we listen to Harriet Jacobs’s searing indictment of slavery’s exploitation of women’s fertility or to Dr. Dorothy Ferebee’s insistence on folding reproductive and childcare services for the poor into a broader health agenda, we learn feminism’s power and potential for structural transformation. Over the past 160 years, three central elements distinguish intersectional feminism’s approach to justice: first, the theory that the experiences of Black women and others pinned to the bottom by race, class, and sex best illuminate the extent and effects of power and oppression; second, the method of building alliance and solidarity across social positions, to effectively dismantle—rather than merely reform—the institutions we have inherited from a legacy of genocide, enslavement, and empire; and finally, the goal of fundamentally redistributing resources to create more equitable systems that serve the many, rather than privilege the few.
Above all, intersectional feminism leads us forward because it is a movement to eradicate systemic inequality. While today the phrase “intersectional identities” has become common, it is an empty phrase, evacuated of any relation to Black feminist theory. Scholar and author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor clarifies that when the Combahee River Collective coined the term “identity politics,” they “saw it as an analysis that would validate Black women’s experiences while simultaneously creating an opportunity for them to become politically active to fight for the issues most important to them.”11 The key focus, then, is not on Woman as an individual subjectivity or that politics should be based on identity, but on recognizing that those on the bottom of the power hierarchy are its experts. These feminists approach sexism as a system fully embedded within racism, homophobia, transphobia, empire, wealth accumulation, and more. As made clear by Pauli Murray’s insistence that employment protections on the basis of race and sex were necessary, intersectionality interrogates the institutions that engineer the basic chances of life and death.
We can recognize intersectional feminism by its goal to collectively defeat the social systems that allow some people, both women and men, to optimize their own potential by draining the vitality and resources of everyone else. While white feminism leans in to the structures of disposability that give shape to everyday life, intersectional feminism seeks to demolish the entire edifice. Pauli Murray wasn’t satisfied chipping away at Jim Crow piecemeal, showing one at a time that a segregated institution wasn’t an equivalent of its counterpart for whites—she wanted to invalidate the very premise that separate could ever be equal. Intersectionality aims not for awareness or inclusion but for “revolutionary action,” in the words of the Combahee River Collective, to build mass power that can genuinely threaten the status quo.12
Dismantling the interlocking systems that result in, for example, a Black woman being 69 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman, requires a breathtaking amount of vision, effort, and persistence.13 White feminism promotes empowering female figureheads to rise to the top. But today, intersectional feminism takes on goals like organizing for Black lives, raising the minimum wage, expanding universal healthcare, protesting mass incarceration, supporting the reproductive choices of poor women, and ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine, all of which have dramatic consequences for the lives of millions of women, men, and nonbinary people.
And together, the many far outnumber the few. Capitalism is working fine for the 1 percent but not for the 99 percent—and even Sheryl Sandberg suffers jaw-dropping misogyny in her own workplace. And though the white supremacist patriarchy seems to work for white men, especially if they are rich, it is itself a gilt cage, often bereft of friendship and care and rife with competition and violence. As Zitkala-Ša modeled with building the first political organization that united Native tribes across the country and Sandy Stone advocated by framing trans lives that push beyond the sex binary as part of a larger antiracist, anti-imperialist counterdiscourse, intersectional feminism proceeds through illuminating overlapping alliances. It mobilizes through building points of common cause into solidarities that unite across distinct identity positions. Individuals, however empowered they may be, don’t overthrow centuries-old systems of exploitation. But coalitions do, or at least they have a fighting chance.
Yet intersectionality is not a war, seeking to raze everything to the ground. An intention to destroy reproduces just that, for it contains no seeds of other forms of life. The endpoint isn’t extermination—it’s rebirth and transformation. Intersectional praxis is simultaneously an act of demolition and creation, an affirmative act of love, faith, and care. It creates practices in which flourishing belongs to the commons, not to the few, and in which those who have paid the highest prices in the white supremacist patriarchy, especially cis and trans Black women, are valued for their knowledge and leadership. It works to topple hierarchies of individuals and build ecologies of care in their place. We need to uproot racism, sexism, ableism, the sex binary, and more. But we also need to nurture the hearts and minds that drive us to revolutionary action and to attend to the energy that courses through us all. Mutual aid, interdependent networks, reciprocal relationships, the union of mind, body, emotion, and spirit within our own lives and within our feminism: these are the modes of social movements that can broadly redistribute the relative chances of life and death.
While researching and writing this book, I have been struck by the expansiveness of the intersectional vision of the world, how it extends beyond the material plane altogether and into the realm of the spiritual. In white feminism, power is largely something owned by white men that must be seized. The worldview of capitalist modernity sets the limits of its vision for justice until optimizing the self becomes the ultimate horizon. But for Frances E. W. Harper, Zitkala-Ša, Pauli Murray, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, power ultimately does not belong to humans but to the realm of spirit—it is not something to be grabbed but to be shared, with gratitude. The worldview of intersectional feminism is bigger than the individual, bigger than the human institutions that provide or deny rights and opportunities. The horizon instead is the flow of life that connects us all.
Feminists may support equality for women, but our true task is to determine what exactly equality looks like. The feminist movement is the grounds of an ongoing struggle to hash out the theories, methods, and goals that might bring us closer to gender, racial, and economic justice. “The future is female” slogan images an inevitable feminist future without conflict, as if a straightforward, undebatable politics and vision flows forth from the bodies of cis women. But the history of feminism is the history of the fight to define feminism, to determine what it advocates and whom it represents. This internal tension doesn’t compromise feminism—it comprises it. Distinct approaches to feminism are the vehicles through which new visions, platforms, and approaches arise. Yet we are not stuck in the history of feminism, doomed to repeat its fault lines. The past teaches us that feminism can become an antiracist project that is incompatible with white supremacy in any form.
White feminism cannot become truly inclusive of women of color, trans and disabled people, and the poor, for its politics are fundamentally at odds with their survival. The goal, instead, is for intersectional feminism to out-organize the white feminist fantasy of a world civilized and optimized by the empowerment of women. Intersectionality is both a confrontation with power and a praxis of care. Some of our best hopes for abolishing the structures that render people, species, and even the planet disposable—and for constructing habitable worlds in their place—arise from its politics. To know the counterhistory of feminism is to have an emerging blueprint for a collective future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FEMINIST RESEARCH IS ONLY POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF FEMINIST COMMUNITY. I THANK GENERATIONS of scholars and writers who came before me and who are working today for re
vealing the complexity, tensions, shortcomings, and breakthroughs of the movements for gender justice. Due to limited space, only a small fraction of their efforts is explicitly cited here. Yet this book would not exist if not for their rigor and care in bringing the histories of feminism to light.
For enabling me to join this conversation, I am grateful to my advisers, colleagues, and students, especially Barbara Welke, Shelley Streeby, Lisa Lowe, Nayan Shah, Rosaura Sánchez, Michael Davidson, Ann Fabian, Mary Hawkesworth, Abe Busia, Brittney Cooper, Maya Mikdashi, Ethel Brooks, Jasbir Puar, Marisa Fuentes, Treva Ellison, Sarah Blackwood, Dana Luciano, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Lauren Klein, Karen Weingarten, and the students of my Feminist Theory: Historical Perspectives class at Rutgers in the momentous term of spring 2020. Three writers, and their classes, showed me how to write compelling prose that invites the reader in: Xeni Fragakis, Brian Gresko, and T Kira Madden. Three people were pivotal in enabling this research to flower into an actual book: journalist Nawal Arjani; my visionary agent Ed Maxwell at Greenburger Associates, who taught me every step of the process; and my research assistant/comrade Leo Lovemore, PhD, whose keen eye and steady hand kept this project growing even when I got lost in the weeds.
At Bold Type Books, editor Katy O’Donnell and publisher Clive Priddle made a more-than-welcoming home for this project. Katy’s edits propelled the book into the most vital territory: I am grateful for her exceptional attention to the smallest details and largest stakes of the project. I thank the Bold Type and Hachette team for guiding the book through the many stages between draft and print, including editorial assistant Claire Zuo, editor Remy Cawley, production editor Brynn Warriner, art director Pete Garceau, copyeditor Jennifer Top, fact checker Cecilia Nowell, and marketing director Lindsay Fradkoff.
Working on this manuscript reignited my love of feminist books and grounded me throughout a pandemic. I thank the spaces and writers that provided crucial company: the Writers Studio at the Center for Fiction and then, in the Zoom era, my virtual writing pals Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Dana Luciano, Jordan Alexander Stein, Tavia Nyong’o, Raúl Coronado, and Sarah Blackwood. I am grateful to my sister, Lisanne Dinges, for her enthusiasm for the project and dedication to the nitty gritty of bringing research to life, title by title and page by page. I am happily indebted to those dear friends who lived with the project, too, and generously shared their wisdom even when they probably wished I was talking about something else, especially Ali Howell, Rossi Kirilova, Gus Stadler, Pete Coviello, Eng-Beng Lim, Elizabeth Marcus, Cat Fitzpatrick, Porochista Khakpour, Greta LaFleur, Catherine Zimmer, Ilana Sichel, Kent Bassett, Shuchi Talati, Jacob Hodes, Kelly Pendergrast, Diana Cage, Maxe Crandall, Elizabeth Steeby, and Jules Gill-Peterson.
I extend my gratitude to the healers who have helped pluck me out of the grips of the tick-borne illness that has defined my last decade: Lilia Gorodinsky, Yuka Lawrence, and Kevin Weiss.
May we all live lives marked by less suffering and more mutual care.
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Jennifer Buhl
Kyla Schuller is an award-winning scholar and recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and American Council of Learned Societies who lectures across North America and Europe. Her research has been featured in The Nation, and her writing has appeared in outlets including The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Avidly. She is associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and the author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press, 2018).
PRAISE FOR
THE TROUBLE WITH WHITE WOMEN
“Kyla Schuller turns her razor-sharp focus and intimate understanding of the intersection of race and gender to some of the giant figures of white feminism—and their contemporaries who challenged them from the get-go. From Frances Harper and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan, Schuller reminds us that even from its beginnings, white feminism has seen significant and sustained challenges from Black, Indigenous, and other women of color. In highlighting this counterhistory, Schuller digs not only into the professional output of these historical figures but into their personal lives, deftly demonstrating how the two interact. With her characteristic originality and insight, Schuller offers a gripping contribution to the growing mainstream critical literature on white feminism, and in the process delivers a master class not only on how the personal is indeed political but on how the specific is universal.”
—Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears/Brown Scars
“Kyla Schuller has always impressed me as a brilliant human being and outstanding scholar, but The Trouble with White Women overshoots even my greatest expectations. Kyla reveals the facts—what we need to know as well as what we fear—but she also shows a way out. As a brown Muslim woman living in America, I never tire of context for the mess we’re in, and Kyla tells the stories of so many women we’ve heard too much of and those we’ve been straining to hear—all of their tales surprise and in fact inspire. This is a great model for how to make a takedown a work of great art, how devotion to the truth can cut into a dominant narrative not just like a knife but with the hard wiring of real love. When I read this book, I feel like America just maybe has a future after all.”
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album
“In The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism, Schuller offers an indispensable gift and a profoundly illuminating resource. The systemic inequality of our world relies, too often, on myths of our own making. In these pages, Schuller dismantles injustice with an urgent and critical lens, offering a new dialogue and a way forward. Schuller is an expert at articulating the malignant disjunctions and hypocrisies of our culture with stunning craft, style, insight, and narrative suspense. Schuller is one of the most essential writers and scholars of our time.”
—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
“Clarifying, challenging, exquisitely researched and argued, The Trouble with White Women will give you so much to sit with and to revisit—it prepares us to do the hard, essential labor of dismantling white feminism.”
—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: FEMINIST FAULT LINES
1. While exit polls reported 52 percent of white women voted for Trump, later analyses put the figure at 47 percent. “An Examination of the 2016 Electorate, Based on Validated Voters,” Pew Research Center, August 9, 2018, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/; Amanda Barroso, “61% of U.S. Women Say ‘Feminist’ Describes Them Well; Many See Feminism as Empowering, Polarizing,” Pew Research Center, July 7, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/07/61-of-u-s-women-say-feminist-describes-them-well-many-see-feminism-as-empowering-polarizing/; James Gillespie, “Dad’s a Feminist, Says Ivanka Trump,” The Times, July 3, 2016, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dads-a-feminist-says-ivanka-3bz9krjp0.
2. Jessie Daniels, “The Trouble with ‘Leaning In’ to (White) Corporate Feminism,” Racism Review, March 18, 2014, www.racismreview.com/blog/2014/03/18/white-corporate-feminism/.
3. Paula Gunn Allen, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism,” Sinister Wisdom 25 (1984): 41; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 143–144; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990), 5; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 1–2; bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 1–2.
4. “White Feminism,” Dictionary.com, 2020, www.
dictionary.com/e/gender-sexuality/white-feminism/.
5. Ruby Hamad, “We Shouldn’t Be Surprised by White Women’s Complicity,” Medium, December 9, 2020, https://gen.medium.com/we-shouldnt-be-surprised-by-white-women-s-complicity-7d9e66b0bd4b; Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, ed. Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 110.
6. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection,” 145; Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 18.
7. Brittney Cooper, “Feminist Digital Pedagogies Conference: Post-Intersectionality,” Institute for Women’s Leadership, Rutgers University, April 30, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wrIlDA1s_M.
8. Rachel Elizabeth Cargle, “When Feminism Is White Supremacy in Heels,” Harper’s Bazaar, August 16, 2018, www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a22717725/what-is-toxic-white-feminism/.