Were we to postpone focusing on women’s interests in deference to what always gets named as more urgent—nationalist cries of crisis and cynically manipulated threat? Who gets to make history?
It is in the interest of women of all generations to invent a complex, resistant, and sexually curious strain in feminist thought and action. History can show us how.
Poland’s proposed abortion ban is part of a broader attack on women by the right-wing PiS government, which has sought to banish the word “gender” itself from the country’s vocabulary. But Polish feminists and their allies are fighting back.
When I first heard that my college had formed ties with a prison and that some of our teaching assistants were already offering courses to inmates, I leapt to join on. Motive? Dare I say it? Boredom. Teaching well is …
On June 4, 2009, Poland celebrated the twenty-year mark since the first (partially) free elections in the Soviet bloc, the result of the roundtables where communist and Solidarity leaders negotiated what we now recognize as the beginning of the end …
The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Simon & Schuster, 2006, 208 pp., $16.99 This lightweight book is being reviewed everywhere because of the following intensely engaging facts: Its author, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was …
Regime change now? It would be wonderful if Saddam Hussein were gone, the miserable, old-style totalitarian thug. But do we want the new-style U.S. techno-thugs, smooth and increasingly precise, to take charge? Perhaps we’ll look back at communism and rogue …
Here are five tangential responses to Michael Walzer. (1) Remember, in 1989, the left’s hope that the end of the cold war might bring a “peace dividend,” an economy less dependent on war? Those hopes died in Yugoslavia, Somalia, and …
In the post 1989 world, intellectuals and activists are suffering from an ongoing case of surprise. No one, for example—East or West—expected the wars that came seething out of Yugoslavia. With each day’s newspaper, pundits rush to reverse themselves. (“NATO …
The dynamism of Marxism, the flowing sixties atmosphere, and the general tendency of feminist utopians to dream of amniotic bliss—all meet in The Dialectic of Sex. When one remembers that the feminist bookshelf wasn’t a foot long in 1970, the fullness, clarity and force of Shulamith Firestone’s feminism is simply amazing.
The tone of the symposium question is forlorn, and its terms hint at trauma and disappointment. In about equal parts, I identify with this voice, and I don’t. As a cultural group, we U.S. leftists (Old and New now shoveled …
Justice, Gender, and the Family by Susan Moller Okin Basic Books, 1989, 216 pp. Justice, Gender, and the Family hopes to continue work that political theorist Susan Moller Okin began in her useful Women in Western Political Thought (1979). The …
In the early days of this wave of the women’s movement, I sat in a weekly consciousness raising group with my friend A. We compared notes recently: What did you think was happening? How did you think our own lives …
