Sunday, January 3, 2010

The Essential Feminist Reader, Edited by Estelle B. Freedman


To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of my life. It is to search for personal clarity in the midst of systematic destruction, to join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand power structures with the intention of challenging them. (Rebecca Walker "Becoming the Third Wave")

Right on, sister!

The Essential Feminist Reader, edited by Estelle B. Freedman, co-founder of the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University, is the most comprehensive collection of feminist writings I've ever come across. Freedman's gleanings span continents and centuries, including obscure writers like the Swedish Alva Myrdal alongside big names like Susan B. Anthony, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lord, and Betty Friedan. I came across old favorites, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), and discovered new ones, like W.E.B. DuBois' "The Damnation of Women" (1919).

But perhaps a more appropriate title for this anthology would indicate its emphasis on feminism and race. Freedman includes many sources that show the intersection between sexual and racial issues. Almost all of the writers she puts forth for us here us the language of slavery, both literal and figurative, to articulate the oppression of women. For most of history, that has been the case, but to focus entirely on race, as Freedman nearly does, ignores other important areas of feminism. She does address the issue of the female body as an area of both oppression and empowerment with excerpts from Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) and Margaret Sanger's Woman and the New Race (1920), but there is only one passage concerning the environmental movement in the entire book: Native American environmentalist Winona LaDuke's speech to the United Nation's Fourth World Conference on Women, entitled, "The Indigenous Women's Network: Our Future, Our Responsibility" (1995), in which she drew connections between man's oppression of women and his exploitation of natural resources. Where is Françoise d'Eaubonne or any of the other ecofeminists who, like LaDuke, saw parallels between the domination and subjection of both women and "Mother Nature" through the construction of ideological hierarchies? This is a whole swathe of feminist literature that Freedman omits.

But she does include the "Riot Grrrl Manifesto" and Guerrilla Girls posters, in addition to so many incredible essays that I would never have come across otherwise. Maybe Freedman's feminist reader is unbalanced in its emphasis on race, but it is nonetheless essential.

Freedman, Estelle B., ed. The Essential Feminist Reader. New York: The Modern Library, 2007. 430 pp.

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