★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: The Second Wave: A Reader In Feminist Theory
• Editor: Linda Nicholson
• Author: (Various)
• Year: 1997 (mine was a textbook-sized paperback)
• Genre: Feminism
• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN 0-415-91761-1 (paperback)
• Author’s Goodreads Page

 

Summary

This textbook, used in college courses like Feminist Theory, is a collection of 23 seminal essays from 1953 through 1997, intended for “more advanced undergraduate or graduate” students, “sophisticated students who wanted some sense of changes within feminist theory over time” (according to Nicholson’s preface). I found it still for sale at multiple popular online outlets, starting at $50 and higher. I happened upon a free copy — my wife still had it from her college years. (Such a text probably wouldn’t have been allowed on my college’s campus.)

For the unitiated, second-wave feminism is the name given to feminism in the early 1960s and onward — as feminism moved beyond the early, basic rights of voting and owning property toward other inequalities that continued to face women: reproductive rights, domestic violence, marital rape, custody and divorce law, etc. (It was replaced by the “third wave”, beginning at some point in the late 1980s or 1990s — depending on who’s making the classification.)

Why would I read a book like this, you might ask? The same reason I would read any non-fiction book: to learn something. To be forced to think. To keep my mind active. This book provided all of that and more.

 

Commentary

The style is almost entirely heavily academic. At no point were any of the authors attempting to be accessible to lay readers. It uses phrases like “correlative unit” and innumerable weighty words like “cathected”, “conceptualism”, “contrapuntal”, “detumescence”, “dyad”, “epistemology”, “formalizable”, “generativity”, “haecceity”, “intrapsychic”, “introjection”, “nonessentialized”, “noumena”, “parturitive”, “phallocratic”, “positionality”, “scoptophilic”, and yes, even “vinculum”. Some I had seen before; for others I utilized dictionaries.

Unless you’re a super-genius, this isn’t a book you can read in an afternoon or even a weekend. In my case, it took months — mainly because I took breaks between essays to read other books (lighter fare). My mind required these breaks to rest from this one. The following is a representative passage:

“Such ambiguities in the meaning of key words in Marx’s theory in turn make possible certain serious problems within the theory. In particular, they enable Marx to falsely project features of capitalist society onto all societies, and with most relevance for the purposes of this essay, to cross-culturally project the autonomization and primacy of the economic in capitalist societies. This point is illustrated by examining Marx’s claim that ‘the changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’ This claim is intended as a universal claim of social theory, i.e. it is meant to state that in all societies there is a certain relation between the ‘economy’ and the ‘superstructure’. If we interpret ‘economy’ here to refer to ‘all activities necessary to meet the conditions of human survival’, the claim is non-problematic but trivial.”

— Nicholson, pg. 134

There was much to enjoy. While I don’t quite feel like I just took a class in feminist theory (something I’d be glad to do if the affordable opportunity ever arises), I am certain my awareness has been raised. I now know things I didn’t know before. Other things, of which I had been only vaguely aware, now have more concrete foundations. And not every passage was too dense to understand on first reading. The following passage, for example, was very clear:

“If gender is simply a social construct, the need and even the possibility of a feminist politics becomes immediately problematic. What can we demand in the name of women if ‘women’ do not exist and demands in their name simply reinforce the myth that they do? How can we speak out against sexism as detrimental to the interests of women if the category is a fiction? How can we demand legal abortions, adequate child care, or wages based on comparable worth without invoking a concept of ‘women’?”

—page 340, Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism

One thing I was (sadly) unaware of was the sheer volume of feminist scholarship that existed. This is the kind of ignorance likely to arise when one is raised in a somewhat conservative home and very conservative church, when one attends a basic public high school in a rural area, and when one ends one’s education at a private evangelical Bible college. It’s not that I was unaware of feminism; I have long considered myself a feminist, I married a feminist, and I am raising feminist children. But I simply had no idea that it existed as a field of study, that so many brilliant and well-schooled people had put so many ideas and philosophies into print about it.

I like that it was written entirely by women. Not that it would have to be, because (I assume) there are men or non-binary humans studying and writing in this field too, even during the five decades covered by this collection. But because it’s rare, in my experience for any collection of writings on any topic to derive solely from women. I also realize that for many years, every book I read was written by a man.

I was surprised at how often intersectionalism came up, even if the word itself didn’t appear often. I didn’t hear of intersectionalism until the 2010s and had no idea that the concept had been around for so long. Several of these essayists devoted significant space in examination of how feminism works differently for women who also belong to other marginalized demographics (poverty, non-white, etc.), and how feminism isn’t working well if it ignores these “other” women. Two quote:

“The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess any one of these types of privileges have.”

—page 67, The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”

“Black women’s concrete experiences as members of specific races, class, and gender groups as well as our concrete historical situations necessarily play a significant roles in our perspectives on the world. No standpoint is neutral because no individual or group exists unembedded in the world.”

—page 253, Patricia Hill Collins, “Defining Black Feminist Thought”

I was also unaware until reading this how much of early feminist theory identified with Marxism or was said to derive from it. This is now the third or fourth book in just a few years that depended heavily on the reader being familiar with the writings of Marx — and I’m not familiar with any of those writings. It may be that I should pick up a Marx reader at the local library before too long.

Besides Marx, quite a bit of the thought rested on Freud — or was built as a reaction to Freud’s theories. In most cases, the authors assumed the readers are deeply familiar with the referenced writings, and I wasn’t.

 

The Contents

The essays (some extracted from other books) are as follows, in the order they appear in the book:

1. “Introduction” to The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir (1953)
2. The Dialectic Of Sex, by Shulamith Firestone (1970)
3. The Traffic In Women, by Gayle Rubin (1975)
4. A Black Feminist Statement, by The Combahee River Collective (1979)
5. The Equality Crisis, by Wendy W. Williams (1991)
6. The Unhappy Marriage Of Marxism And Feminism, by Heidi Hartmann (1981)
7. Capitalism And Women’s Liberation, by Michèle Barrett*
8. Feminism And Marx, by Linda Nicholson (1985)
9. The Woman Identified Woman, by Radicalesbians** (1970)
10. Sexuality, by Catharine A. MacKinnon (1989)
11. The Psychodynamics Of The Family , by Nancy Chodorow (1978)
12. Woman’s Place In Man’s Life Cycle, by Carol Gilligan (1979)
13. The Feminist Standpoint, by Nancy C.M. Hartsock (1983)
14. Defining Black Feminist Thought, by Patricia Hill Collins*
15. One Is Not Born A Woman, by Monique Wittig (1981)
16. What Has Happened Here?, by Elsa Barkley Brown (1995)
17. The Theoretical Subject(s) Of This Bridge Called My Back And Anglo-American Feminism, by Norma Alarcón (1991)
18. Imitation And Gender Insubordination, by Judith Butler (1989)
19. This Sex Which Is Not One, by Luce Irigaray (1977)
20. Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism, by Linda Alcoff (1988)
21. In A Word : Interview, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, with Ellen Rooney (1989)
22. Structuralism Or Pragmatics?, by Nancy Fraser (1992)
23. Contesting Cultures, by Uma Narayan*

* Note: if no year is listed above, then the earliest date I could find for the work is 1997, in this book, The Second Wave.

** “Radicalesbians”, according to Wikipedia, consists of Artemis March, Lois Hart, Rita Mae Brown, Ellen Shumsky, Cynthia Funk, and Barbara XX.

 

Points Off For...

Keeping in mind that my point system isn’t supposed to be an objective measure of a book, but rather my subjective reaction... I took points off for it being difficult to read. Often, the difficulty in reading a book is due to the reader’s inability or lack of education, and that could certainly be the case here. But I would be very surprised if the average reader of the English language could breeze through this collection. I think in this case the difficulty is due to the authors directing their work toward a very specific audience: academia.

 

Conclusion

Usually this is where I would either recommend the book to others or avoid making a recommendation. Here, I will simply conclude that I learned quite a bit, despite the difficulty in parsing the verbiage.

I do wish there was a more accessible, happy medium in feminist literature. In my experience, I have come across two kinds, at nearly opposite poles: (1) the academic, dense writing like that found in this book, and (2) anecdotal, lightweight pieces that might be fun to write but don’t bear much weight and probably won’t stand the test of time. (If there is some thoughtful, well-researched book that is also written for a lay audience, I am open to suggestions.)

 

 

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