Lynn S. Chancer - After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism: Taking Back a Revolution

ADVANCE PRAISE

In this sweeping, unflinching account, After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism tackles the paradox of American feminism. Interrogating feminisms own thorny contradictions and challenges, Lynn Chancer offers women a bold and inspiring plan for claiming equality with menonce and for all.

Lisa Wade, author of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus

After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism is an engaging, well written, and accessible map of our feminist past, present, and future. This book should be required reading for everyone interested in gender justice and committed to the full human rights of all women and men.

France Winddance Twine, co-editor of Feminisms and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice

With her characteristic brilliance, Lynn Chancer charts the hard-won victories and persistent obstacles that have marked womens changing status since the rise of second wave feminism. After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism is a tour-de-force diagnosis of contemporary feminisms conundrums and a blueprint for feminists of all stripes to come together to achieve equality.

Kathleen Gerson, author of The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family

Lynn Chancer offers us an alternative to leaning in, one responsive to the needs of diverse groups of women and rooted in intersectional activism. Her insights are a welcome and revitalizing intervention, outlining a bold and practical way forward and a hopeful path toward big tent feminism.

Kerwin Kaye, Wesleyan University

Lynn Chancer, a lifelong feminist scholar, has the perspective necessary to help us understand where feminism is now, where it came from, and where it could go. Whether youre a newly minted feminist or an old hand, this book is a fresh read on feminisms promise for full liberation as well as the roadblocks that could stop the revolution in its tracks.

Laurie Essig, author of Love, Inc. Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter

After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism makes a compelling case for how feminists can find common ground from an intersectional perspective to organize for social justice. Impressive and timely, this is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in gender, social movements, and contemporary culture.

Isabel Pinedo, Hunter College, CUNY

Lynn Chancers advice for completing the feminist revolution is sage, practical, and eminently useful. Feminists young and old will be reinvigorated by this call to battle.

Judith Lorber, author of Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change

Lynn Chancer illuminates the commonalities that connect feminists from across the movement. Anyone who has been marginalized because of any aspect of their beingincluding gender, sexuality, race, class, education, and beyondwill find solace and hope in this book.

Beverly-Xaviera Watkins, NYU College of Global Public Health

AFTER THE RISE AND STALL OF AMERICAN FEMINISM

TAKING BACK A REVOLUTION

LYNN S. CHANCER

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chancer, Lynn S., author.

Title: After the rise and stall of American feminism : taking back a revolution / Lynn S. Chancer.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018041925 (print) | LCCN 2018043464 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503607439 (e-book) | ISBN 9780804774376 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: FeminismUnited States. | Womens rightsUnited States.

Classification: LCC HQ1421 (ebook) | LCC HQ1421 .C465 2019 (print) | DDC 305.420973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041925

Designed by Bruce Lundquist

Typeset by Classic Typography in 10.75/15 Minion Pro

Cover design by Angela Moody

To

Alex

and his many feminist friends,

who inspire my conviction in the ability

of future generations to change

Contents

Preface

For reasons it has taken me a long while to divine, this book was the hardest to write of anything I have published to date. First, I fretted about titles; as the research and writing moved along, names for the book morphed in point/counterpoint with events. In 2014 I envisioned calling the book Im Not a Feminist but... : Re-igniting a Stalled Revolution. Many people, including feminist friends and my editor, appreciated the title since the phrase Im not a feminist but... had become recognizable in and beyond the purview of college classes and professors. At that historical moment, it was just about commonplace to hear people begin statements by disavowing the label feminist before going on immediately to agree with a major tenetsay, equal pay for equal workthat was widely associated with feminism (and feminisms). In that year, too, it was not unusual to hear talk of postfeminism, a term frequently associated with earlier generations of women now in their sixties and seventiesin other words, with mothers and grandmothers whose daughters had realized major benefits of a supposedly no-longer-needed social movement.

However, as feminist issues, from violence against women to political and economic inequalities, appeared to be undeniably persistent (especially considering problems of all women across races and classes) and as the word feminist was used positively againfor example, in 2013, Beyonce calling herself a modern-day feministI decided the title needed recasting. What I settled on was The Rise and Stall of American Feminism: Taking Back the Gender Revolution since, as this book states, remarkable achievements and stubborn impediments are obvious from the second waves heyday in the late 1960s and 1970s through the present. For feminists of the second wave, sexism began to be defined in those decades in terms of discrimination women encountered in and outside the workplace, as well as sometimes coercive controls and objectification of womens bodies that impeded or prevented women from living full, equal, and safe lives. Yet feminist goals like universal daycare and womens equal participation in politics and the culture industries have still not fully come to pass.

But then I started thinking, and shifting, again. Did the title sound too negative? So much was happening in the United Statesnot only from 2014 onward but following the 2016 presidential electionas to augur a potential renaissance in the importance of calling oneself a feminist. The #MeToo movement that rose and spread spectacularly in 2017 and 2018 bespeaks a highly significant feminist appropriation of social media. It continues to bring major effects, at a pace that is hard to keep up with, in and beyond the world of the internet and mass culture. As a result, powerful men from Harvey Weinstein (in Hollywood) to Ron Porter (in the White House), to name but a few, have been brought down by people, by women, acting collectively in response to the sometimes frustrating insufficient impact of charges made at the level of individual legal cases. These effects may assist in redressing many of the sociological issues analyzed in this book that show stalling in some areas or by some criteria. At the same time, feminists concerns with nuanced thinking recommends applying #MeToo carefully so that due process issues for men and for everyone are respected, and so that unequal charges are not treated (incorrectly) as equal.