Kylie Cheung - A Womans Place: Inside the Fight for a Feminist Future

Astute and unapologetic, A Womans Place is an ultimately hopeful dispatch from the resistance in the Trump era. Cheung shows us how young feminists haveand will continue tocarry on the fight for justice.

Maya Dusenbery , former editor of Feministing.com and author of Doing Harm

How do young women negotiate the truth that, under a late-capitalist patriarchy, the labels victim and oppressor almost always coexist within the same person? Such is the central meditation of Kylie Cheungs A Womans Place, a clear-eyed chronicle of the feminist movements fourth wave.

The Gen-Z daughter of Asian-American immigrant parents in California suburbia, Cheung offers sharp analysis of how our overlapping identities inform the experience of this political moment and all it entails: the fight to save Roe v. Wade, post-#MeToo backlash, and the interconnected struggles of marginalized populations. Through it all, she shows that traversing a path forward still matters, despite the jarring back-and-forths between small victories and defeats. In A Womans Place, Cheung reveals herself as one of todays most exciting new voices for a generation of emerging feminist thinkers.

Kelli MARA Korducki , books editor at Forge by Medium and author of Hard to Do

Kylie Cheung is one of the most talented feminist writers of her generation. Cheung educates her readers on the erased histories and nuanced intricacies of todays feminist issues in an approachable way, truly ensuring feminism is for everyone. A Womans Place is a thoughtful memoir of a young feminist exploring the systemic misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and classism surrounding her and taking the reader on a journey toward understanding intersectionality, challenging white supremacy, and fighting for a vision of a feminist future grounded in reproductive justice.

Renee Bracey Sherman , reproductive justice activist and founder of We Testify

Cheungs book captures the journey of a feminist awakening in a particular, and particularly fraught, moment in time. Her clear-eyed writing is both introspective and outward looking. With impassioned, intelligent young thinkers like her leading the next iteration of the feminist movement, we are in capable hands.

Lindsay Miller , news and culture director at PopSugar

With every new wave of feminism, comes the inherent criticism that some are doing it wrong. Every generation of feminists has faced accusations of being too radical, too angry, too sensitive, too loud, too feminine, not feminine enough, and the old standby of being hysterical about freedoms that so many believe we no longer need to fight for. In this informative, personal account of how feminism shaped her generation, Kylie Cheung shows how this ever-evolving political ideology is as necessary as ever, and that in many ways, the fight has only just begun.

Heather Wood Rudulph , managing editor of Dame magazine

Journalist Cheung debuts with a sharp and reflective examination of the state of fourth-wave feminism... [She] skillfully communicates the urgency of these issues, and demands respect for her Gen-Z cohorts from an older generation of feminists. This galvanizing call to arms will resonate with young activists.

Publishers Weekly

Copyright 2020 by Kylie Cheung. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
Berkeley, California

Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in the United States of America

A Womans Place: Inside the Fight for a Feminist Future is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cheung, Kylie, 1998- author.
Title: A womans place : inside the fight for a feminist future / Kylie
Cheung.
Description: Berkeley : North Atlantic Books, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A fearless primer to
the feminism we need now: tactics for advancing reproductive justice,
promoting intersectionality, and pushing back against misogyny,
gaslighting, and patriarchal systems of oppressionProvided by
publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020003938 (print) | LCCN 2020003939 (ebook) | ISBN
9781623174842 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781623174859 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Womens rights. | Sex discrimination. | Sex
role. | Equality before the law.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 .C445 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1155 (ebook) | DDC
305.42dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003938
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003939

This book includes recycled material and material from well-managed forests. North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.

For the endlessly dedicated, endlessly courageous abortion providers and reproductive health-clinic staff across the country and around the worldI know how thankless your work is; I wrote this book to try to begin to thank you.

Often, Ive found the most common error in mainstream narratives about feminism is the notion that this fight can somehow be won or lost by one, grand societal event, be that the years-long struggle for universal womens suffrage or the election of Donald Trump, the federal legalization of abortion rights through Roe v. Wade or the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018.

To be certain, there are everyday wins and losses, big and small. But no single outcome will ever end this fight that we shoulder as women, the fight of and for our lives: to be autonomous, credible, respected, human.

Feminism embodies the broad assertion that all people across lines of gender, race, ethnicity, orientation, class, and ability deserve equal status and the same fundamental rights, self-determination, and access to resources. It is not a race toward one gain or another, but a steady, determined evolution taking place on the individual and societal levels, with progress on either of these levels never made in isolation but through constant interaction and synergy.

That said, feminism is hardly something I gave much thought to throughout my childhood and early teenage years cloaked in the privilege and ignorance of youth in an affluent, upper-middle-class suburb. Then, suddenly, I was sixteen and needed it as a matter of survival, safety, and means of understanding the cruelty and rigidity that had come to govern my life. And in all the years since, through personal gains and losses and colossal changes in the world, the need for it in my life has never lessened.