Introduction

WHEN I WAS TWENTY-SIX, I published a personal essay on passing as both white
and straight, of which I am neither. I’m light-skinned and very conventionally
feminine, attributes that I’ve found throughout my life make strangers,
colleagues, bosses, and subjects I’ve interviewed think they are talking to a white
straight woman. This has come with an array of advantages on both a day-to-day
level (a police officer has never asked me why I’m loitering) and a professional
level (would you have hired me to run this national women’s outlet if I read
more queer?).
When I went looking for more documented experiences of passing,
everything I encountered seemed to message that this was something that used
to happen, therefore implying that it somehow doesn’t anymore. The most
recent and robust archives documented Black Americans in the twentieth
century who were light enough to re-create their lives as white Americans.
Basically decide that they were white and start their lives over as white people
who could use the “whites only” drinking fountains, secure more lucrative and
stable job opportunities, and marry white partners. There was a tremendous
incentive to “cross the color line,” as historians of passing have sometimes
described it, as you were guaranteed more freedoms, opportunity, resources, and
liberty—all things white society has traditionally guarded.
But I wanted it documented that passing happens now—well beyond Jim
Crow laws, the federal recognition of same-sex marriage, and the uptick in
mixed-race children being born in the United States. If people think that you are
white, that you are straight, that you’re cisgender, that you’re a citizen, that
you’re middle- to upper-class, they speak to you and assess you in a different and
decidedly advantageous way.
The essay I wrote went viral and I still receive a lot of messages from people
all over the world who tell me that I put words to an experience they had never
been quite able to distill. I also received a lot of criticism and hate mail—
standard fare when you have an opinion on the internet as a woman, as a queer
person, as a person of color.
But more disturbing to me than even the most violent or condescending
responses was the assertion that I should just be white. That if I was light
enough to pass and other white people were buying it, why couldn’t I just
ascend to whiteness? Wasn’t this an upgrade? Wasn’t this progress?
Key in this assumption that I would even want to is the unquestioned belief
that white is better. That if I am being given the opportunity to be a part of this
special club where I’m not racially harassed and managers deem me competent
before I even say anything, I should just take it. But even more importantly, I
shouldn’t question it.
I knew acutely how powerful bodies viewed me. What I didn’t necessarily
know directly at this point in my life was how they viewed the barrier for entry.
That’s what women’s media taught me.
At one editorship, we would often receive the print covers (back when people
just barely cared about cover reveals) about a day or so before they would go
online. It was a somewhat oddly ceremonious but nevertheless exciting tactile
experience for editors and writers who largely existed in pinging Slack channels,
perpetually cluttered email inboxes, and rapid-fire social media updates; there
was very little we could hold in our hands and feel satisfied about. All pride
happened largely in the internet ethos. Tweets from virtually anywhere sharing
certain pieces, engagement reports that you could pull, a huge bump in traffic
that would register across the entire company. Except for one morning a month
when an unmarked box would arrive on our floor and the staff would usually
gather around while it was opened to reveal all the fresh magazine copies.
In November 2016, the cover star was Nicki Minaj, the face unmistakably
hers in all those shiny, pristine stacks. I remember taking one copy in my hands
and studying the flattering styling and clean lines of her makeup—thick black
eyeliner and a high-neck blouse with heavy pleating. She looked so beautiful and
commanding, so instantly recognizable above a caption that read “Anything Jay-
Z can do, I can do.”1 Another editor came up behind me as I was beholding a
representation of the most influential woman in hip-hop and also remarked on
how pretty the cover was. She liked it too, she said just over my shoulder. And
then she added, “I love when they make trashy people look good.”
This observation, a throwaway comment she made before putting down her
purse and fetching some coffee from the office kitchen, seared into a piece of my
brain that I never got back. I remember hearing the sound of her flats as she
sprinted away but I became anchored in exactly that gray carpeted spot. I
eventually did move. I have a brief memory of going to the bathroom. I went
back to my desk. I did my work. I was productive. But those syllables
reverberated along my keyboard for months afterward, catching me slightly in
the moments where I weighed an edit or checked my email.
What settled deep into my body over time is that people like Nicki Minaj,
people like me, people very unlike both of us, would never really fit into this self-
styled version of feminism. No matter what words we used in meetings or how
we were presented, there was still always going to be some feminist-identified
branded content editor who would use words like “trashy” to describe our class,
our sexuality, our race, our culture, our politics, our history, and, most
importantly, our strategic goals as marginalized genders.
Reactions to my passing piece rushed back too. The parallels between both
responses, that you should just be white, that you should just be more
respectable-looking, fundamentally fail to question power. Or to reenvision it.
What’s more, that we’d always have to achieve or pursue certain conventions to
even be seen or addressed.
I saw distinct overlaps with a lot of the messages many other competitor
outlets published around that time that aren’t consistent with women’s lives:
that you should just get over imposter syndrome and crack the capitalist whip,
even when the women reporting to you can barely afford to pay rent. All these
scenarios have the trappings and allure of individual gain, and that’s how they
are justified: a job you’ve always wanted, an expensive dress you “deserve,” an
accolade that you’ve always dreamed of—which, in the short term, are often
framed as collective wins for all women or people.
The politics of assimilation are vast and thorny. And for many
disenfranchised groups in the United States, taking on the rules and parameters
of the oppressor have sometimes been a means to basic survival. You will live
another day if you speak this language, if you dress like this, if you marry in this
capacity, if you pray to this god, if you conduct yourself in this way.
When I started my career in women’s media, gender was just emerging as an
acceptable beat outside the traditional realms of fashion and beauty. This meant
that I could openly sit at job interviews with fairly mainstream outlets and
discuss the wage gap and pregnancy discrimination without being immediately
dismissed as “angry.” I learned somewhere in the middle of my career, though,
that in many of the glass conference rooms where I plotted out coverage, the
reality of women’s lives stopped somewhere around attaining a white-collar
leadership position and achieving a heterosexual marriage with a cis man who
also changed diapers. All other “feminist” realities had to orbit around that one,
or feign subscription to that ultimate ideal.
To me, the scope of topics was intricate and continuous: birth control,
healthcare access, wage gap, parental leave, incarceration, immigration, gun
control, job discrimination, affordable housing, assault and harassment,
environmental protections, food security, education, small business and
enterprise. That line, though, by which gendered problems become “feminist”
ones was at times disorientating to even try and identify. Much like a hot kettle
that you absentmindedly touch on the stove, I oftentimes didn’t realize I had
crossed that line until I abruptly had—colleagues staring at me in meetings as I
posed that queer women also endured a high sexual assault epidemic by other
women or that the rapidly ascending cannabis industry was a huge slight to the
many incarcerated women of color who had been jailed over marijuana
possession. What I remember most from these meetings was the silence that
settled in afterward. A sort of static motion where opinion pieces or essays or
features would be silently weighed against an aspirational reality that I was still
trying to understand: independence, financial stability, and increased rights.
Sometimes my higher-ups let me pursue these stories and assignments; other
times they didn’t.
I learned the words they used, “edgy,” “fresh,” “different,” “shiny,” and later,
“woke,” and tried to erect a sphere where most if not all of my stories were
accepted. If I had to punctuate my pitches with sanitized corporate-speak to get
them past the proverbial and sometimes literal gatekeepers, I was willing to do
that. A lot of my thinking around this time period was with respect for the
awesome magnitude of the platform available to me. Editing a package on how
women feel about gun culture in the United States is impactful if readers who
never considered gun control now do. Reporting a story on how male-identified
people use makeup outside the mandates of gender is worth whatever internal
hand-wringing it took to get it out there if it encourages readers to consider
gender limitless. I’m used to code switching: I don’t use the same words and
signals and phrasing with my wife in explicitly queer settings that I do in offices
with bosses, in settings with primarily straight people, with my family, and when
I go to the bank. I considered this just another skill set I’d have to build as a
biracial queer woman in a deeply siloed world. Just like everything else. Pile it
on.
But in pointed ways, this march toward alleged gender equality wasn’t like
everything else. This was supposed to be the pathway to correction; the means
by which we adjusted and standardized a culture that would look better for
marginalized genders. This was supposed to be “feminism.”
What seemed to develop into full-fledged stories, though, as opposed to what
stayed embryonic in my email inbox, followed an even calculus, a way of viewing
the world through a hierarchy of issues. I could assign or edit pieces on the
uptick of incarcerated women and girls as incidental to the larger picture. I could
assign a story on skin bleaching and the lengths women would go to achieve an
evasive beauty ideal. But if I critiqued the values that were at the center of that
ideal, that larger picture, my idea was promptly dismissed.
A feminist-identified manager at MarieClaire.com had a very specific way of
communicating to me that my ideas weren’t right for the brand. When I pitched
stories on trans men weighing their birthing options or teens and tweens
partnering with corporate power rather than questioning it, usually over email,
my boss would often write back with one word in all-capital letters: “NICHE.”
It was a careful coding, a way of telling me that what was a prominent gender
issue to me was a secondary issue to the outlet. Poor women trying to afford
diapers was never deemed as central or urgent as white straight women trying to
get rich or expounding on their heterosexual relationship problems.
My experiences were not unusual. In 2020, the New York Times reported that
Hearst, the company that owns Marie Claire, “has faced staff members’
demands for action on what they described as a culture of discrimination that
has long been ignored.”2
By my manager quantifying some gender topics as “niche,” it stifled what
stories were told. But even more concerning, it facilitated a weird feminist reality
where everyone more or less had enough money to live, where abortion rights
were the only reproductive issues often covered, where financial coverage was
narrowed to student loan debt or deciding whether to start a business empire.
Women and nonbinary people who experienced gendered violence or oppression
outside of this lens weren’t covered. Or, worse, given the one-off treatment with
a single story versus the continued coverage of women accruing personal wealth
in the name of feminism. For the former, their encounters with misogyny were
presented as nonessential or peripheral to the bigger feminist call to action.
Female entrepreneurs are less likely to receive seed money to start a company, oh,
and over here, a trans woman was brutalized. By covering the number of Black
women and girls incarcerated once, by investigating impoverished women
seeking out black-market abortion alternatives once, outlets much like mine
anomolized these realities, advancing the illusion that they were incidental to the
broader gender landscape.
This editorial strategy produced a daily feminist-branded rhythm that was so
lopsided in its gender concerns, the coverage can be summarized like this: lean in,
money is feminist, abortion rights, Taylor Swift got bangs!, Should I have a
baby?, 10 eye creams, This Manicurist Is Doing the Most Amazing Nail Art in
Quarantine,3 Why We Turn to Gardening in Times of Crisis,4 Uncomfortable
Truth: Women Are Allowed to Be Mean Bosses, Too.5
When I’ve navigated feminist-branded environments like conferences, panels,
and co-working spaces, this second tiering of women and people is addressed as
something that can be corrected through anecdotes: Did you know bisexual
women are more likely to experience sexual assault? Did you know trans women
are much more likely to experience violence than cis women? Did you know
Latinas make less money than white women who are already paid less than white
men?
But the only reason these data points are prompted in the first place is
because of a centralizing of white feminism. These realities are positioned as
alternatives, offered through asterisks, through footnotes, through a bulleting
system by which the number one reality is cis, female, white or white-aspiring,
middle-class, able-bodied, young, and straight.
In my own encounters with white feminists, though, this allegiance is not
addressed in a literal way. It’s not like anyone has ever looked at me in a meeting
and said, “Actually, we are only dedicated to white feminism at this brand.” They
accomplish this in other, more insidious ways. Much like my boss used to do,
there are contemporary codes for relaying this lens.
Here’s another. In 2015, I was offered a job as a news and politics editor of
Glamour. As the interview process progressed, I asked the two editors with
whom I interviewed where the brand stood on a variety of issues: immigration,
gun control, abortion, sex education, federalized parental leave. I wanted more
clarity on the stances that I could advocate for editorially if I accepted the job. I
wanted to know where they draw the line. The editors exchanged glances and
explained that the stance needed to be “pro-woman” across all issues. I asked for
more clarity on which specific issues I could cover while simultaneously
thinking, I don’t know what “pro-woman” means. They circled the same drain
and eventually came back to maintaining that all politics coverage needed to be
“pro-woman.”
I didn’t accept the job; and fortunately, I was offered another that made it so I
didn’t have to. But that phrasing of “pro-woman” would stay with me as I
reflected on the editors’ inability to align with any issue that didn’t evoke
mompreneurs on Instagram. It’s when I trace the phrasing “pro-woman”
through the length of my editorial career, across the people who have hired me,
who have hoped to hire me, whom I’ve worked alongside and negotiated
editorial packages and politics and cultural reporting with, that I always end up
at the same place: white feminism. And, perhaps most tellingly, even though
plurality was often used to convey that this was about “women,” it would really
only be one type of feminism that would be incorporated, stealthily positioned
as being all-encompassing.
What I ultimately learned, though, is that these weren’t slips or blunders—a
simple lack of awareness. White feminism is an ideology; it has completely
different priorities, goals, and strategies for achieving gender equality:
personalized autonomy, individual wealth, perpetual self-optimization, and
supremacy. It’s a practice and a way of seeing gender equality that has its own
ideals and principles, much like racism or heterosexism or patriarchy. And it
always has.
Like a lot of oppressive precepts, white feminism is a belief system more so
than being about any one person, white, female, or otherwise. It’s a specific way
of viewing gender equality that is anchored in the accumulation of individual
power rather than the redistribution of it. It can be practiced by anyone, of any
race, background, allegiance, identity, or affiliation.
White feminism is a state of mind.
It’s a type of feminism that takes up the politics of power without
questioning them—by replicating patterns of white supremacy, capitalistic
greed, corporate ascension, inhumane labor practices, and exploitation, and
deeming it empowering for women to practice these tenets as men always have.
The mindset is seductive, as it positions the singular you as the agent of change,
making your individual needs the touchpoint for all revolutionary disruption.
All you need is a better morning routine, this email hack, that woman’s pencil
skirt, this conference, that newsletter.
The self-empowerment approach gets even more dangerous when it’s
executed on a large scale: companies, education, and government infrastructure.
The relentless optimization of the self often means that systemic and
institutionalized barriers, to parental leave, to equal pay, to healthcare, to
citizenship, to affordable childcare, to fair labor practices, are reframed as
personal problems rather than collective disenfranchisement. If they are one’s
own dilemmas to solve, then you engineer an individualized path to overcome
them as opposed to identifying, assessing, and organizing against a structured
bias together.
White feminism has traditionally straddled this line, advocating for and
organizing for personal solutions, historically because people of this ideology
simply have more of them.
This doctrine doesn’t prioritize activism that does not put middle-class
personal realities, obstacles, or literacies front and center. And to that end, this
ideology often doesn’t respond well to efforts to democratize or expand it.
That’s because white feminism is ultimately invested in maintaining the
superiority of whiteness, specifically in the face of feminism. Supporters of white
feminism want to reconcile their feminism with the mythology that they are still
special, better, “work harder,” and are therefore entitled to the roles that any
combination of race, class privilege, conventional femininity, and/or a cis gender
have landed them. White feminism aspires to and affirms the illusion of
whiteness, and everything it promises, even if those who practice it are not.
How I ended up here, at a national women’s outlet circa 2016, with these types
of questions and quandaries, says a lot about how feminism originated in the
United States to begin with. Historically, the term comes from France.
“Féminisme” was first used in 1837 by French philosopher and socialist Charles
Fourier6 to quantify the idea that women could live and work as independently
as men.7 By the mid-nineteenth century, the term had evolved into English in
both Europe and North America, along with a developing movement for
women’s rights. The first organized feminist gathering of women in the United
States is considered the Seneca Falls Convention held in New York in 1848.
Directed by abolitionists and feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia
Mott,8 the terms of this battle were clear and beneficial to a specific group: white
women who wanted equality to white men, particularly through education,
property, and, most importantly, the right to vote. This is when white feminism,
meaning shared power over these systems with men, began. Seven decades later,
women’s suffrage and the word “feminist” would be fused as one all-
encompassing approach to women’s rights in the United States.
The term has come in and out of fashion many times since then. Most
recently feminism arrived via pop star endorsements and #MeToo challenges to
culture and SMASH THE PATRIARCHY desk mugs, contributing to the
cultural narrative that women are collectively enjoying a better way of life. Like
because Americans saw a record number of women run for president in the
2020 election9 and “Nevertheless, She Persisted” was memed and successfully
weaponized, gender rights have collectively been won or, its slightly more
dangerous adjacent theory, are very close to being won. All we need is male
partners who actually prioritize childcare, as middle-class mothers bemoan to
the New York Times during the COVID-19 pandemic that their husbands
simply aren’t contributing to the home in the way that they are.10 Or another
historic batch of women serving in Congress.11 Or a female president by 2024.12
We are almost there. We are on the right path. Everyone more or less understands
feminism now. It’s just a matter of encouraging more girls to go into STEM
fields or showing women that they too can run a company if they want to.
This assumption is just as wildly inaccurate as it is prevalent. But, darker still,
the whole Feminism is everywhere now! narrative has an almost gaslighting effect
on women of color, in which we’re being told by broader mainstream dialogues
that our lives are so much better when we’re actually just an asterisk in a wage
gap statistic. Because when you remove white, economically comfortable women
from the gender landscape, feminism isn’t quite everywhere. Change in gender
politics hasn’t come fast. For many women, it hasn’t come at all.
Between 1980 and 2015, Black women narrowed the wage gap with white
men by nine whole cents.13 It’s taken longer than my lifetime to achieve less than
a dime of progress. Latinas are even worse off, having narrowed the wage gap by
an entire nickel in thirty-five years.14 Meanwhile, our nation is rapidly pricing
many of us out of the avenues to upward mobility. The cost of college degrees in
the United States has effectively doubled,15 increasing eight times faster than
wages. More and more women are being incarcerated in this country; the
number of imprisoned women has grown more than 750 percent between 1980
and 2017.16 And from 1991 to 2007, the number of children with a mother in
prison has more than doubled.17 Despite that efforts like the Affordable Care
Act have insured many, women of color have lower rates of health insurance
than white women, barring them from getting treatment for preventable and
chronic health conditions.18 The tenuous economic reality by which most
women of color live day-to-day in the United States was further underscored
during the coronavirus pandemic: many cleaners, nannies, and domestic workers
saw their already unreliable incomes instantly vanish as stay-at-home measures
grew.19 And relief efforts by the federal government notably did not include
many undocumented and immigrant women, women who sustain an entire
sector of care work.20
In a time of alleged heightened “feminism,” women of color and poor
women are being left behind, and yet the trappings that uniquely target us, like
poverty, incarceration, police brutality, and immigration, aren’t often quantified
as “feminist issues.”
The reason there is so much dissidence between what a female CEO says you
can do and the lived reality of what you can feasibly do is that this type of
feminism wasn’t made for us. We need a movement that addresses the reality of
women’s lives rather than the aspiration of what they hope to be.
In this urgent time, we need a new feminism with explicitly different
strategies and goals. But before we can build a movement, we have to
acknowledge the deep and enduring conflicts that have preceded this moment.
We need to learn how to recognize and chart the course of white feminism so we
can dismantle it once and for all.

Part I
The History of White Feminism

To talk about racism within feminism is to get in the way of feminist happiness.
If talking about racism within feminism gets in the way of feminist happiness,
we need to get in the way of feminist happiness.
—Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life1

Chapter One
The Making of a “Feminist”

“FEMINIST” USED TO BE a dirty word in modern popular culture. At the height of
her influence in 2012, after being praised for producing “empowerment”
anthems for young women, Taylor Swift famously denied that she was a feminist
to a Daily Beast reporter. Her response, which would evolve in the coming years,
conveyed a belief in gender parity while dodging the term. “I don’t really think
about things as guys versus girls. I never have. I was raised by parents who
brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life.”1
It was quintessential “I’m not a feminist, but…” a recurring and well-
documented cultural shorthand in which equal rights were espoused but
allegiance to feminist ideology was evaded. Swift, while a prominent example of
this, was part of a larger cohort of pop icons who made similar statements. That
same year, Katy Perry said at Billboard’s Women in Music luncheon, “I am not a
feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women.”2 The following year, in
2013, Kelly Clarkson told Time that she has “worked very hard” since she was a
teenager, but “I wouldn’t say [I’m a] feminist, that’s too strong. I think when
people hear feminist it’s just like, ‘Get out of my way I don’t need anyone.’ ”3
Earlier that year, then newly appointed Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer explained, “I
don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that, I certainly
believe in equal rights.”4
These shortsighted, yet “I believe in equal rights!” tempered responses were
reflective of an outright vilification of feminism in the broader culture. In 2003,
Maxim notoriously published a pictorial guide on “How to Cure a Feminist.”5
Around that same time, the proliferation of the term “feminazi” was used across
then dominant, George W. Bush–era right-wing culture to describe women who
believed in abortion rights, particularly by influential figures like Rush
Limbaugh.6 This was coming off the late 1990s, which saw the Riot Grrrl
movement give way to a whole Billboard list of underage pop female vocalists
with Christian-adjacent values of virginity, when a series of pop cultural digs at
feminism was also rampant.
In the 1999 film Election, Reese Witherspoon’s character, a plucky, self-
determined know-it-all student who aims to win a high school election, is
framed as a villain—a thorn in the side of the relatable and therefore reliable
male narrator, played by Matthew Broderick. In 10 Things I Hate About You,
another popular teen movie that came out that same year (and a remake of The
Taming of the Shrew), the lead character Kat Stratford is similarly maligned for
her explicit feminist politics and The Bell Jar consumption. From politics to pop
culture, the message was very clear: feminism is bad.
Yet, in other arenas of culture—most notably the internet—gender was a
coursing concept. Like a lot of subcultures (and yes, gender politics was
definitely an internet subculture in the 2000s), people who thought critically
about gender or who wanted to consume it in real time through media
congregated around blogs: Jezebel, Feministing, Racialicious, plus a myriad of
personal blogs and YouTube diatribes. This was as close as you could get to
feminist interpretations of pop culture without physically hosting them in your
living room or taking a women’s studies class or accompanying me to queer
parties.
So it’s no surprise really that the first time I heard Beyoncé’s 2013 song
“***Flawless,” which included a clip of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
explosively popular 2012 TEDxEuston talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” I
expected the sound bite to cut right before the word “feminist.” That’s how
sanitized the mainstream culture was of that term. The fact that the word and its
extended definition were included in their entirety came across as very, very
intentional.
The pivotal moment when Beyoncé stood before prominent “FEMINIST”
signage at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards7 drove home the signature pink-
and-black possibility that you could be an internationally top-selling female
vocalist and care about systemic gender inequality—or so I thought. Like many
journalists and writers at the time, I initially saw this strategic declaration as
progressive, informed by the fact that I had honestly never seen anything like this
come out of pop culture in my relatively brief lifetime, nor had others.
Barbara Berg, a historian and author of Sexism in America, told Time after
the VMAs that “[i]t would have been unthinkable during my era.”8 Roxane Gay,
who had just published her essay collection Bad Feminist a few weeks before,
said on Twitter, “What Bey just did for feminism, on national television, look,
for better or worse, that reach is WAY more than anything we’ve seen.” And
Jessica Valenti facetiously tweeted a screencap of Beyoncé’s shadowed silhouette
before the blaring “FEMINIST,” stating, “Really looking forward to the next
magazine piece calling feminism dead or irrelevant.”9 Unequivocally, Beyoncé
had moved the proverbial needle between pop culture and feminism.
But when you see “FEMINIST” as a set prop during the VMAs, what does
that even mean? What does a feminist stand for?
If you asked suffragettes—the elite white women who built the first wave of
American feminism—the term “feminist” evoked obtaining the vote and having
access to what their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers had.
That’s the feminist credo that motivated blooming suffragette Alice Paul to
join the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), circa
1910.10 She believed she should be able to pursue the same professional and
educational opportunities available to the men in her community. As far as she
was concerned, she always had—until she left her isolated home and realized
many women couldn’t.
Even though she was born in 1885, Paul was raised to believe in gender
equality from a very young age. She played sports like field hockey, baseball, and
basketball and was an excellent student, particularly an ardent reader. Her
parents were Quakers, a faith that had many “radical” teachings, including
spiritual egalitarianism between men and women and no official religious
ministers or ceremonies.11 “I never had any other idea… the principle was always
there,” Paul later said of the atypical opportunities she took for granted.12 But
although these principles were central to her home, faith, and community, Paul
would realize they were not reflected in society. Many American laws and
political practices kept women in secondary positions to men. And not being
able to participate in an alleged democracy by voting was, to women like Paul,
the biggest disenfranchisement.
Raised on a sprawling farm in New Jersey, Paul and her three younger siblings
had access to a lot of comforts for the early twentieth century: indoor plumbing,
electricity, and a telephone.13 Most of the labor on the “home farm,” as Paul
called it, was completed by hired laborers and domestic workers;14 her father was
a very successful businessman15 and the president of a bank in Moorestown,
New Jersey.16
With the bulk of the household labor managed, Paul’s mother, Tacie, was
able to make other investments in her daughter. Tacie hosted and attended
regular suffrage meetings, both on the farm and elsewhere. She started bringing
her eldest daughter with her to listen as women openly discussed the ongoing
failure to get states to ratify a women’s suffrage amendment. That had initially
been the plan laid out by iconic suffragettes from the 1890s: Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. Get the states on board with
amendments and then pressure Congress to approve a federal amendment.17
But this strategy had stalled. And now, sitting in a new century, in parlor rooms
and farmhouses and kitchens, women still did not have the right to vote.
Around the time Paul began attending suffrage meetings with her mother,
the plan had shifted again. NAWSA had decided to implement a “society plan”
to draft influential people, including privileged women and college-educated
women, into the gospel and societal necessity of suffrage.18
Paul would grow up to put this plan into action, but not exactly as the ladies
who sipped tea in her living room had imagined. After graduating from
Swarthmore College in 1905 (her grandfather, another champion of equality
between men and women as it stemmed from Quaker faith, had cofounded the
institution), Paul traveled to England to study social work at a local Quaker
college.19 Historians credit her time in England with radicalizing Paul in her
political strategies; while studying, she passed a large crowd heckling a woman
speaking publicly to the urgency of women’s suffrage. The screams and verbal
harassment from the crowd were reportedly so loud that you could barely hear
the speaker. The chaotic public demonstration (this was not her mother’s
demure suffrage meetings) piqued her interest and she introduced herself to the
woman who had been yelling at the crowd.20 Her name was Christabel
Pankhurst, and she was the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, both deeply
radical British suffragettes photographed often in the press for fighting back
when mobs heckled them. The Pankhursts were routinely arrested for breaking
windows, throwing rocks, and engineering rowdy, public demonstrations to
publicize the need for suffrage. The more pictures of them getting handcuffed in
the London newspapers, the better.
Paul was fascinated by this approach; it ran so counter to how her mother
and other Quaker women organized quietly around petitions and prayers. The
way their meetings were always sequestered in the private spaces of homes and
living rooms, away from public view and scrutiny. Militant British suffragettes
wanted to be seen, and they were willing to defy the conventions of gender and
social order to achieve that. Paul quickly joined their efforts. The good and quiet
little girl from New Jersey who was valedictorian at Swarthmore21 was now
getting arrested in the name of suffrage, going on hunger strikes, and being
forcibly fed while imprisoned.22 (She later told a newspaper in Philadelphia that
she never broke any windows, though.)23
By the time Paul arrived back in the United States by way of the steamer ship
Haverford,24 she was intent on bringing wide-sweeping, public demonstrations
to American suffrage. And she credited her education from British suffragettes
with illuminating that necessity. In 1910, she reported this update on how
British women were progressing with the cause: “The militant policy is bringing
success…. [T]he agitation has brought England out of her lethargy, and women
of England are now talking of the time when they will vote, instead of the time
when their children would vote, as was the custom a year or two back.”25
After formally joining NAWSA, Paul set her sights on planning a big
spectacle for women’s suffrage in Washington, D.C. With friends and activists
Crystal Eastman and Lucy Burns, Paul envisioned a huge parade up prominent
Pennsylvania Avenue to coincide with President Woodrow Wilson’s
inauguration.26 With all the press in attendance, no one would be able to ignore
them.
The idea was power. The big victory was the vote. When that right was
achieved, young white women everywhere knew they could enter and influence
institutions, whether they be politics or commerce. They could be recognized
outside of the home to shape and impact the politics that governed the country.
Simultaneously, they set a template for how this ideology would thrive: by
partnering with power and consumerism.
As Betty Friedan would say in her widely sold book The Feminine Mystique
five decades later, “The feminist revolution had to be fought because women
quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human
capacity.”27

Chapter Two
Who Gets to Be a Feminist?

IF “FEMINISM” IS PRESENTED as a hot new trend among elite women like Beyoncé,
then that same math works backward too: elite women are, and always have
been, the trendsetters for feminism. They will dictate the decor in the proverbial
“room of one’s own.” Feminism will ultimately be framed as having a certain
fashionability, and it’s very easy to look out on the cultural landscape to discern
who the trendsetters are.
In 2016, it was The Wing, which I was a member of from 2017-2018, “an
exclusive social club for women”1 with high-profile founding members across
entertainment, media, politics, business, and the digital influencer space, like
then president of J.Crew Jenna Lyons, editor Tina Brown, Man Repeller
founder Leandra Medine, rapper Remy Ma, among many others. Upon opening
their first location in New York City, cofounders and CEOs Audrey Gelman and
Lauren Kassan told multiple outlets that the club drew inspiration from the
American women’s social clubs of the turn of the century while also offering
members a highly curated “network of community,” according to The Wing’s
website.2
In the 1910s, it was the suffragettes actively courting the interest of popular
actresses Mary Pickford and Ethel Barrymore,3 both young, glamorous women
who were challenging conventional understandings of gender with their very
public personas and professional prowess, dual aberrations for women of the
time. Pickford was one of the first American actresses to be a powerhouse with
instant name recognition. She set the template for hearing the name “Jennifer
Lawrence” or “Julia Roberts” and knowing exactly who that is, down to their
hair color, dress, and most recent films. Billed by her name, a rarity in early
American cinema,4 she expanded her influence from the big screen to
controlling virtually every aspect behind it: writing, costumes, lighting, makeup,
casting, and set design.5 Her professional titles would go on to include producer,
screenwriter, and, later, studio executive—she would cofound the film studio
United Artists Corporation with other big names like Charlie Chaplin. 6
Barrymore was equally recognizable, considered “the first lady of the American
stage,”7 with an iconic upswept hairstyle8 that was emulated by fans. From the
acclaimed Barrymore acting dynasty, Ethel stood out for her unparalleled talent
but also for her multidisciplined passions: she read Henry James, she wrote short
stories, she wrote plays—and she had “swish.”9 In short, both women were
brands.
Since the beginning of organized women’s rights in the United States, white
feminism has lurked, adapted, and endured—rebranding and reincarnating
alongside the revolution of its day. Women like Barrymore and Pickford lended a
chic allure to suffrage with the added dimension of instant press coverage. (In
1910, when Barrymore attended a suffrage meeting, the New York–based
Morning Telegraph went with the headline “Ethel Barrymore is a suffragist.”
The musical nature of that headline is the mellifluous sound of a suffrage PR
director getting promoted.)10
As white women began advocating for the vote and challenging the
traditions, social etiquettes, and decorum that limited their social participation
beyond the domestic sphere, they encountered a serious PR problem. Because
women who spoke publicly, before large crowds and in public spaces, were
deemed deviant—breaking from what was considered respectable lady behavior
—they realized they essentially had to change the public perception of what a
suffragette is.11 But they had a new platform to consider that radical suffragists
before them did not have: growing consumer culture. Since the 1880s, the
development of department stores and the mass production of wares made
stores the new centralized place for Americans. And with the impetus to sell,
these stores, managers, and advertisers had to orchestrate elaborate fantasies by
which to get people, namely women, to buy.
Suffragettes embarked on their branding challenge by usurping the channels
of mass culture to remake their image in what America, tradition, and power
valued: whiteness; thin, able bodies; youth; conventional femininity; middle-
class motherhood; heterosexuality; and a dedication to consumerism above all
else. This depiction of a suffragette, a young white woman who sheltered white
children and wore her hat just so as to indicate a certain class and respectability,
was outlined in-house and exported virtually everywhere. Maud Wood Park, a
suffragist and founder of the Schlesinger Library, where I executed much of the
research for this book, put the strategy this way: “People can resist logic but can
they resist laughter, with youth and beauty to drive it home? Not often.”12 The
publicity of women’s suffrage was, from the onset, engineered not to challenge
or educate the American public on women’s expanding roles—it was to affirm
that suffrage shared them.
Relatively quickly, the appearance of the suffragette on posters, signs, and
advertisements (because they did make straight-up advertisements for suffrage)
was the type of young woman the average American would want to extend rights
to,13 because she didn’t digress too far from what women are supposed to be or
who is deemed a woman in the first place. She was not a scary “other” with horns
and a “shrill” voice who was “trying to become a man” and vote. She was soft,
feminine, fair-skinned, and therefore unthreatening to business as usual.
Suffragettes of this strategy also envisioned the conflation of a political and
commercial identity, an enduring political strategy. Using this specific “face” of
suffrage, they were keen to capitalize on commercial influence and get their
stylish suffragettes in store windows, magazine advertisements, and with
accompanying political gear for purchase. Macy’s was declared the “headquarters
for suffrage supplies” in 1912, offering an official parade marching outfit that
included hat pins, lanterns, a sash, and a war bonnet, among other need-to-have
accessories.14 NAWSA, along with many other suffrage groups, would establish
suffrage stores within prominent shopping districts, cementing the idea that you
could, and in fact should, buy your feminism.
Businesses were all for the merging of politics and products. In the 1910s, as
suffrage began to blossom into growing popularity, many stores profited on the
trend by using suffrage colors and branded paraphernalia in their window
displays, including the very elite Fifth Avenue boutiques in New York City.
Macy’s created a special suffragette window display with official suffrage white
hats, complete with yellow trimming, adorned with “votes for women” flags or
pennants. By 1920, those trinkets would expand to include mass-produced
playing cards, drinking cups, luggage tags, fans, dolls, hats, valentines, and a
variety of official suffragette-endorsed attire.15
White feminism isn’t new, but it has found new life. The same platform that
motivated the middle-class and upper-class suffragettes to partner with
commercial retailers, endorsing an official “suffrage blouse,” a “suffragette
cracker,” and “womanalls,” lives on today. And it’s the posh women, like
Barrymore, like Pickford, like founding members at The Wing, who relay these
messages and products through mass culture. Beginning an explicitly feminist
mission from within posh circles runs just as deep as the movement itself.
Throughout my own career, people I’ve worked with and interviewed have
assured me that this strategy is unintentional, and that everyone is welcome to
the movement, if they just claim the “F” word. But, like any sorority, white
feminism does have specific parameters for anyone who wants to join their cause.
Just ask those beyond the parameters.
When I arrived at my private women’s college as a first-year in the fall of
2005, Mills College did not have a formalized trans admission policy—because,
for years, they didn’t feel they had to. The women’s seminary, founded on a
legacy of the cis daughters of wealthy families being sequestered with books
before landing husbands, gave way to more overt radicalism in the 1960s and
1970s. This tension, between the conventionally feminine, the traditionally
ladylike, the performance of gender as your parents and grandparents would like
it, and deeply radical queer and race theory as your professor and first girlfriend
would like it, is super concentrated—and you can encounter the entire spectrum
simply on a fifteen-minute walk to class.
It’s the reason why you walk by the three-story, white-frosted building that is
Mills Hall, a Victorian dollhouse that is life-size. In the late 1800s, it housed the
entire school: the students, whom I always envision in white nightgowns who
sleep in a long row of twin beds; the classrooms, where they read from identical
books; the teachers, who told them how to think. Over a century later, Mills
Hall still stands like the heart of the campus—the place where I’ve waited for my
professors to receive me for office hours, the narrow, carpeted stairs I climbed to
my literature classes that carry the exact intimacy of a grandmother’s house.
There’s a piano on the first floor that I’ve never heard played, portraits of past
college presidents whose voices I’ve never heard, and hardwood floors that I
know the exact decibel of when a student walks in a hurry.
It’s the ghostly remnants of a type of womanhood that you’ll then go to class
and deconstruct, analyze, hold in your hand, and ask why? Why? Why? You’ll
write papers about it. You’ll check out endless books about it. You’ll see you’re
hardly the first person to ask but actually part of a long legacy of people who
have asked before you. You’ll use their questions to try and answer your own,
but you’ll do it beside long glass cases of vintage tea cups all over the campus.
You’ll walk through a prim rose garden on your way to a class about gender
oppression. You’ll do your French colonialism reading in a dining hall with
doilies and delicate lamps. You’ll be asked to look critically at so many social
conventions and classist standards in an environment that has been
fundamentally shaped by them.
That’s why, when I was eighteen, I found a vintage Mills yearbook in my
dormitory library that had sweet, pearl-wearing graduates on one page and a
photograph of a talent show featuring a blackface performance on another. Why
I have a memory of hearing a fountain gurgle after attending a class in which
Simone de Beauvoir described white women as “slaves.” (When asked for
comment in 2020, Renee Jadushlever, vice president for Strategic Partnerships at
Mills College, told me, “Mills College yearbooks are created independently by
students. As an institution, Mills does not condone wearing blackface and works
consistently to increase our racial sensitivity as a community, including bringing
awareness to issues of cultural appropriation. We strive to foster an inclusive
environment that recognizes and respects everyone.”)
It’s a similar logic that led to an informal student policy in which students
assigned female at birth could continue their Mills education after coming out as
trans men, or genderqueer, or gender-variant. But when it came to trans women
sharing our libraries, sharing our locker rooms, our dormitories, there was no
such avenue formally in place. I remember students softly toying with this
seeming hypocrisy in a space where all our professors used the term “partner” to
describe their relationships and we would try and study the syllables for signs of
queerness. The fact that we often couldn’t tell was lauded as both progressive
and limiting.
That’s why it was deeply disappointing to me when these same women with
whom I studied Judith Butler, with whom I learned that gender was a
performance, with whom I sat on professors’ floors, with whom I used to read
bell hooks, would eventually rationalize that we needed our own space as cis
women. Trans women, who were “different,” needed their own space too. And
they weren’t sure Mills College, or women’s colleges broadly, were that space.
There is the way your stomach falls when someone you thought you knew so
well so fundamentally disappoints you that you don’t even know what to say. I
remember not even having language at first, just these sort of guttural responses
that I would find the sentences for a couple years after graduation. I recognize
their calculations now as part of a much broader continuum in how resistance to
progress gets expressed: but this measure asks that we give something up, but
this will change our experiences in an environment that is supposed to be for us,
but we will be inconvenienced, but this isn’t how we do things, but this isn’t our
history.
But that’s the point. You give it up. Because that history, that assumption,
that insulation, that environment is erected on an assumption of superiority.
The way I was able to articulate it a few years after I left was that our college
was founded on the societal assessment that women were a marginalized gender.
Now, we know that there is more than one.
When I shared this with a woman I graduated with—a women’s studies
major—she argued that they were still better off having their own college, their
own environment that better “catered to their needs.”
Like when the queer women’s website AfterEllen.com published a piece
proposing that trans inclusion has ultimately meant anti-lesbianism.16 Another,
published in 2018, posited that encouraging lesbian-identified women to
embrace “girl dick” is “mak[ing] it unacceptable for women to be able to set
their own intimate and sexual boundaries.”17 This practice can be traced
through the ill-destined Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which notoriously
excluded trans women,18 down through lesbian separatism of the 1970s; lands
and communities that generally exercised very limited understandings of gender.
(In a 2019 Facebook statement, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival founder and
organizer Lisa Vogel denied the scope of this exclusion, writing “We did ask one
trans woman to leave the festival in 1991. Period. No other trans women were
asked to leave or not allowed to purchase tickets before or after that time in 1991.

Prior to this, and after this transgression, we had a commitment to not
question anyone’s gender… long before hipsters were giving their preferred
pronouns in every possible moment.”)19 History has more than demonstrated
that cis women exclusively getting together, sticking a proverbial flag in the
ground, and using words like “ours” has overall not been a smart or nuanced
operation.
What I remember saying to the women’s studies major is, You do realize that
we are the men in this situation, right?
To a young woman who had academically studied structural patriarchy, she
admittedly couldn’t and wouldn’t connect the dots. As cis women, we were the
oppressors here, wavering on sharing “our” space because it would de-prioritize
us. Not everything, every resource, every gender pronoun, every salutation, every
space would be for us anymore. We would exist along a spectrum of marginalized
genders and no longer be the default as cis women.
But this runs counter to what elitism is in the first place. The whole concept
of “private,” “exclusive,” and “respectable” is that you keep some people out—a
thread you can trace through suffragettes looking to attract the right kind of
public face of feminism to my private women’s college to The Wing. And it’s
this fear—of being decentralized through policy and admissions and of suddenly
not being “elite”—that feeds the fire of white feminism.
For groups outside this notion of “elite,” even erecting their own missions
hasn’t necessarily inoculated them from white feminism. In the beginning of the
twentieth century, a number of female activists in Latin America and the
Caribbean began envisioning a global feminist movement that was rooted in
equal pay, maternity rights, women’s suffrage, and sovereignty of their respective
nations. Described as a “Pan-American network” by Katherine M. Marino in her
book Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human
Rights Movement, “They saw women’s rights as explicitly linked to their nations’
quests for sovereignty. [They] believed that organizing collectively for
international women’s rights would ground a Pan-Hispanic feminism that
would challenge U.S. empire in the Americas and would make women’s and
nationally ‘equal rights’ mutually constitutive goals.”20
One of these activists was Clara González, a feminist from Panama and the
first female attorney from her nation, who was very much informed by the class
disparities within her country and the United States exercising increased control
over her home. In addition to having a strong allegiance to all women workers,
she watched as the U.S. renegotiated the terms of their treaty and control over
the Panama Canal in 1926. The language that González often used to articulate
her feminism drew considerably from the Panamanian conversations around
sovereignty that were prevalent at the time, Marino writes.
Other women agreed with González’s growing assertion that a Pan-American
feminism would involve resisting United States imperialism, as a nation of that
scale, power, and amount of resources would forever be dictating to them their
own terms for existing and therefore limiting their rights. In the beginning of
1928, two hundred women, including feminists from the United States,
attended a conference in Havana, Cuba, to announce “a new movement for
women’s rights.”21 An explicit part of their discussion and platform was
critiquing the alleged superiority of the United States in their discourse and
strategizing. At the time, the American feminists, specifically a suffragette named
Doris Stevens, seemed to be on board with this.
Six months after the Havana Conference, as it would come to be known,
González traveled to Washington, D.C., to cofound an organization with
Stevens called the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW). The
organization would eventually grow to twenty-one members, the intention
being to have one representative from each Western Hemisphere republic.
González’s arrival coincided with a photoshoot with Stevens for the National
Woman’s Party, capturing the women mid-conversation under palm trees. The
headline chosen to accompany the image of an American feminist and a
Panamanian feminist strategizing international coalition building was the
declarative “Feminismo.”22 The emblematic photograph, along with text
detailing their friendship and shared commitment to equality, would be
exported to thousands of readers all over the world, finding space in newspapers
in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Cuba, the United States, and Panama, among other
countries.
At the time, González was reportedly excited to work closely with Stevens,
given her endorsement of anti-imperialism tactics at the Havana Conference. In
practice, though, González, and many of her fellow Pan-American feminists,
would learn that Stevens had little interest in dismantling the hegemony of the
United States. More tellingly, once the IACW was established and further
conferences were organized to bring Pan-American feminists together, Stevens
took it upon herself to define for the commission what constituted “feminist”
topics and what was superfluous to their mission. Much of what was stripped
from conversation were topics that were essential to Cuban feminism, like the
United States presence in Cuba and the rise of U.S. duties on Cuban sugar, two
factors that compromised the economic stability of women sugar cane workers.
Cuban feminists were adamant that the IACW—a transnational women’s group
—address these important issues. Marino writes:
A number of Cuban feminists had written to Stevens before the Havana
conference requesting that the IACW oppose the rise of the U.S. duties
on Cuban sugar. The question had become critical after the stock market
crash in 1929, when Cuba’s single-crop export economy deteriorated. The
value of the island’s sugar production had been collapsing; it would
plummet from nearly $200 million in 1929 to just over $40 million in
1932…. In Cuba, the U.S. duties directly affected the livelihoods of many
female sugar cane workers and families who suffered from increasing costs
of living.23
But Stevens rejected these assertions, citing the IACW focus on “feminism”
solely. What she couldn’t and refused to account for was that the American
influence on their economy was foundational to their feminism, as it greatly
impacted their experiences of gender within their country. These economic
imperatives just weren’t crucial to Stevens’s personal comprehension of
feminism as a white American woman. And, in a dynamic I know very
intimately, this lack of proximity to her own personal navigation of feminism
rendered these issues irrelevant. She wrote, “We have had people that wanted…
to come and talk about various things, to talk about peace, and anything but
feminism.”24
Stevens also had ample opportunity to collaborate with those who had a
better grasp on the urgency of U.S. duties on Cuban sugar when organizing the
conference. González suggested perhaps having an international lawyer establish
the agenda of topics and offered the services of her friend, Cuban feminist Ofelia
Domínguez Navarro. Stevens declined, saying that Domínguez could endorse
the topics that had already been assembled, but she could not suggest or finalize
additional ones.
White feminists have pulled this time-honored power play with me within
my career too. The labyrinth is, essentially, “You can endorse my ideas or not
speak.” And so the multinational conference on women’s rights was held
without mention of the pressing precarious economic landscape in which
Cuban women were now finding themselves, thanks to the Great Depression in
the United States. (To make the environment even more hostile for Cuban
feminists, Stevens described Gerardo Machado y Morales, the then president of
Cuba who demonstrated a lackluster allegiance on voting rights for women and
had permitted violent attacks and consequent murders of women protestors,25
as “a feminist president.”26 Machado, a dictator who had crafted a specialized
task force to deal with protesting feminists on the ground,27 also sponsored the
conference.)
Domínguez, a Cuban feminist, was done—and she had originally backed
Stevens when the IACW was established in 1928. In what I recognize now as a
long historical script of women of color and queer people dipping out from
organizations run by ignorant white ladies who wish to stay that way,
Domínguez decided that Latin American women needed their own group to
achieve their needs. In the press, she observed that the power dynamics in the
IACW were ultimately unequal and that the structure “demonstrates once again
our condition of being a subject people to the empire of strength, to treaties
enforced upon us.”28 Continuing to lend “cooperation to these congresses,” she
elaborated, was overall less constructive than founding their own group as
“women of our country.”29
So she turned inward to other feminists in Latin America. She wrote to her
friend Paulina Luisi, a feminist activist from Uruguay and the first woman to
receive a medical degree in her country, that she wanted to establish a new
movement of Latin American women to “jolt our continent!”30 Foundational to
this effort was that they build “a brave and strong resurgence against the yankee
imperialism that depersonalizes us.”31 That’s when Stevens weighed in with the
white feminist opinion no one asked for.
At this time, President Machado was waging violent tyranny against the
people of Cuba, resulting in a civil war. A “secret police” by Machado was
carrying out bombings, gunfights in the streets, and assassinations, resulting in a
number of citizen disappearances. And the United States supported Machado as
a leader, prompting further reassessment of the influence and presence of
America. Yet, despite the many textures to this civil unrest and violence, Stevens
was critical of Domínguez and her allies for not prioritizing women’s suffrage in
this climate.
Domínguez, with what I can only imagine as the patience of a saint,
responded to Stevens that “… they would not promote suffrage, detailing the
many travesties of justice under the Cuban dictatorship that would make
women’s suffrage meaningless and explaining that feminists were targets of
physical violence and imprisonment.”32
Stevens’s response was “terse,” according to Marino, as she indicated no
support for the woman she had been so keen to build a commission with only
three years before. She stated, once again, that they were missing an important
window for suffrage—which Domínguez had just detailed as nonsensical to
their political reality while her fellow countrypeople were being violently killed.
(Stevens wasn’t content with just telling Domínguez that she was doing
feminism incorrectly—she also wrote to the secretary of Unión Laborista with
her didactic Why aren’t you pushing for suffrage?).
Stevens’s lack of understanding for the violence and political landscape in
Cuba was further evidenced when she characterized the protesting of activists
and Machado’s tyranny as a “somewhat hysterical civic crisis.”33 Marino writes
that even the Cuban feminists who were on cordial terms with the IACW were
“deeply upset”34 by this gross reduction of their civil war, activism, and political
priorities. This same tactic of diminishing resistance and organizational efforts to
achieve human rights as “hysterical” or “hysteria” had been, after all, employed
by critics of the suffragette movement. Stevens’s willingness to resurface this
same terminology in responding to explanations from Latina feminists mimics
the power structure she and her cohort had been rallying against. Clearly,
though, this lens did not extend beyond white American women who sought
rights in a very specific United States framework.
A big part of what imbued Stevens to speak this way to Latin American
feminists was that she was feeling very high and mighty from achieving women’s
suffrage in the United States about a decade before. She made the grave
imperialist mistake of upholding her own country’s political tactics as the sole
way of achieving a goal, rather than an experience to offer colleagues. This is
ultimately about power more so than historical precedence. What’s implicit in
her exchanges with Domínguez is her assumption that Cuban feminists didn’t
know what was best for them, their rights, or their country. And because the
United States had achieved women’s suffrage first, that entitles her to dictate
how Cuban feminists fight for their own rights. (Absent from these letters to
Domínguez, as far as I can tell, is any interrogation as to, perhaps, why the
United States was able to pass the Nineteenth Amendment with the systems
present: like capitalism, commercialism, consumer culture, and racism, among
other dynamics.)
After Domínguez went public with her assertions that Latin American
feminists would not find liberation through the IACW, Stevens doubled down
on her dismissiveness. And in a quote that I read from the 1930s that echoes all
the way through my women’s media meetings in the 2010s, Stevens said she
“deplored the division of women into North and Latin American women.”35
(The Organization of American States, which oversees the IACW, did not
respond to my repeated requests for comment.)
The “stop being divisive” mandate is the big verbal flag of white feminism,
and one that I can sense coming from many sentences away. In an effort to raise
fundamental differences in experiences of gender—because they are being
overlooked—you are told that you are being “divisive.” This attempt to recode
lived experience and systemic barriers as “divisive” is not only an attempt to
dismiss them under white and straight and cis and able-bodied homogeny, but
to uphold white feminism as the feminism. Because ultimately, what you are
proposing deviates from that feminism—and that’s why you said it. The
assumption here, though, from white feminists is that you don’t want to
accomplish that deviation or that you don’t know that these experiences, this
data, these statistics, these laws will demand a recognition of an alternate system
of justice. Of the many failures of this common phrasing to shut down more
nuanced conversations about gender, the most insidious is the casual expectation
that you want to be like them or advocate for their causes. This is white
supremacy in practice and a common way to homogenize the feminist
experience as the white feminist experience.
Other ways of protecting the power structure, specifically as it preserves
white Western dominance, obviously aren’t just verbal—they are straight
tactical.
In addition to elbowing Latin American feminists out of positions of
control, Stevens also used money to determine how and when they participated
in dialogues on women’s rights. Marino observes of the time and financial needs
of the activists:
Money was always vital to international feminist organizing, which
required convening individuals at various worldwide destinations. The
work of the affluent U.S., British, and European women in the
International Council of Women and the International Alliance of
Women had long revealed that women from countries with financial
resources generally assumed the positions of power, reproducing
hierarchies that placed women from the United States and Western
Europe over those from the “global South.”36
The way this dynamic manifested within the Pan-American feminist movement
was that Stevens, positioned as the leader of IACW and from a wealthier nation,
could have a hand in attendance at conferences and events. Stevens had entire
financial control over the funds of the IACW, money she procured from donors
in the United States. She reportedly used this money to pay for everything from
photographers to translators. But what she expressly did not use this money for
was facilitating travel for Latina feminists she disagreed with to travel
internationally and make a case for their causes.
Marino points out in her research that Stevens did not officially take a salary
for her role in the IACW, but she did use the money she fundraised to pay for
her own trips abroad. For Latin American commissioners, however, she advised
that they secure travel funding from their respective governments. Many could
not, and so these representatives were unable to attend these international
conferences where critical agendas were set and crucial topics were raised.
Stevens also put up further obstacles for equal representation and visibility:
Stevens did give salaries to several NWP [the National Woman’s Party in
the United States] members who worked with the commission, but
González received no such salary, even though she was head of research for
the IACW and for the first few years one of the only Latin American
women working in D.C. When Stevens invited González to stay at the
NWP headquarters, she did not offer free room and board, stipulating a
rent of eighteen dollars a month.
For González and other Latin American feminists, these dynamics
underscored U.S. economic imperialism over Latin America.37
Paired with this tendency was Stevens’s shrewd dedication to publicity
(photographers were a part of the budget for a reason), in which she was eager to
capitalize on the optics of working with Latin American feminists without
actually encouraging dialogue and shared goals. This strategy, however conscious
or unconscious, of reducing women of color to decorative or cosmetic roles in
bigger organizations has historically been one of their imperatives to leave these
enterprises and start their own. Marino writes:
The National Woman’s Party avidly utilized González in its promotion of
the commission—spotlighting the many accomplishments of the thirty-
year-old lawyer whom the press called “Panama’s Portia.” However,
Stevens never offered the funding that would make possible González’s
travels to various international conferences, which provided the key
staging grounds for the Equal Rights Treaty. González’s exclusions from
these venues was significant. The fact that Stevens was parsimonious with
González, yet offered some funding to other Latin American
commissioners who supported Stevens’s vision more than she perceived
González did, is also noteworthy. Though Stevens wanted González’s legal
research work, she definitely did not want her interference if there was a
chance that González would champion an agenda different than her
own.38
NWP did not respond to my repeated requests for comment.
Regardless of what an enterprise tells you about their mission, why you’re
needed, and the work you can accomplish together, history and lived experience
have revealed that when it comes time to actually implement these changes, the
gatekeepers become more tight-fisted over retaining tradition. The reason they
do this is because actually integrating the changes and perspectives that often
come with these communities compromises the power structure that has either
anointed them or facilitated their ascension. Any threat to that, whether they
recognize it directly or not, is met with fear, suspicion, dismissal, or resistance.
That’s often the part of the utopian mixed-race queer gender-diverse reality
white feminists and their allies don’t account for when they are Instagramming
“Empowered women empower other women” graphics. Having these voices,
these perspectives, these ideas, creates less space for people who have traditionally
held these roles, these titles, and operated this platform. Having more women of
color writers on a staff means there will not be as many roles reserved for white
women. Hiring a queer person means there will be fewer straight people to agree
with you on all your heteronormative editorial decisions. Ceding power not only
means welcoming brown and Black people to your meetings—it inherently asks
you to give up something too. And that’s the second half that we have not yet
engineered cutesy Pinterest-able sayings for, that I have yet to see being sold on
Etsy or hanging in an aspirational woman’s office. Denouncing white supremacy
means that I will no longer be supreme. Fostering diversity in my workplace
means I will talk less as the dominant power in the room. Being pro-LGBTQ
doesn’t entitle me to explain to my lesbian colleague that her relationships are
“easier.”
A student group approached me with such a problem when I was a Joan
Shorenstein fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in the spring of 2019. An
assembly of graduate students were cataloguing a series of changes they wanted
to bring to the faculty in order to reflect stronger racial literacy in their programs
and diversity among the professors. A point I counseled one of the writers on
was that he directly address that hiring more professors of color ultimately
meant hiring fewer white professors. This was anticipatory on my part, in that
my predicted response from Harvard was a script I can recite from memory,
from my own negotiations with power. It usually goes something like this: We
would like to do X but we just don’t have the resources right now and it’s a really
tough time for us and it’s really not the time to explore X as much as we would like
to. Also, we need to set aside X for X, which is a priority because of
AGEISM/CAPITALISM/RACISM/HETERONORMATIVITY/CLASSISM
[PICK ONE OR FIVE].
My advice to the graduate student was that he address those “priorities” head-
on to question both what is deemed a priority, but also to acknowledge frankly
that the student group was asking them to hire fewer white faculty. This
frankness challenges the assumption of white professors being a priority in the
first place.
Lobbying for these types of structural transformations would be purely
exhausting even if it was straightforward. But, in my experience and that of
others, it isn’t. This endeavor is full of pitfalls within a labyrinth of
manipulations and mirrors, often designed to ensure that the powers that be
remain unchallenged. When the appointed agents of change push too hard, they
are frequently relegated to what author, academic, and feminist Sara Ahmed
defines as “institutional polishing.” In her book Living a Feminist Life, in which
she interviews “diversity workers”—people hired to improve a number of
structural failures within various professional settings—Ahmed observes:
Diversity too is a form of institutional polishing: when the labor is
successful, the image is shiny. The labor removes the very traces of labor….
The creation of a shiny surface is how an organization can reflect back a
good image to itself. Diversity becomes a technique for not addressing
inequalities by allowing the institutions to appear happy.39
She elaborates that, “Diversity becomes about changing perceptions of
whiteness rather than the whiteness of organizations.”40 And this is the searing
reality that, once I’ve encountered it face-to-face, I cannot unknow. That I take
with me back to my desk and that clouds my ability to edit efficiently. That you
want to keep this the same and you want me to help you do it.
Through her photography budget and publicized relationships with Latin
American feminists, Stevens was asking González to do the same.
Stevens’s legacy reveals a lot about white feminism’s core mechanics when
employing and building relationships with other ideologies, social justice
practices, and feminisms. Chief among them, though, is the acute ability to craft
contemporary images that tell a story of progress (Here I am posing casually with
a pioneering feminist from Cuba under palm trees!) while maintaining power
structures as is. This dangerous maneuver allows white feminism to usurp the
accolades, scholarship, efforts, and knowledge of people of color, of queer
people, of disabled people, of all disenfranchised people and use it against them
within the very institutions they hope to change.
A word I’ve often heard in professional settings to code this relationship is
“credibility.” Having a person from X background or X identity write this piece,
tweet this piece, endorse this piece, edit this piece, gives it “credibility.” Having a
Black editor within a certain vertical gives the content “credibility.” Having a
woman in a position of power gives the company “credibility” post-#MeToo.
But what is often being masked here is that the structure of the institution
itself does not allow for marginalized identities to flourish, nor is a literacy of
these experiences and realities a requirement for the staff as a whole. So a single
person who is Muslim, who is gay, who is transgender, who is fat, who is
nonbinary, who is a woman, is hired to do the work of optically transforming
the organization and, allegedly, the interior.
González found herself in a position of institutional polishing the IACW, of
lending “credibility” to an imperialist white-middle-class organization that
didn’t care about her rights, the women of her country, or the other Latin
American feminists she was working with.
So she withdrew her efforts.

Chapter Three
Separate but Unequal: How “Feminism” Officially Became White

TELLING WOMEN AND OTHER marginalized genders what their feminism should
look like has a very dark history. It’s essentially a powerful organization telling a
disenfranchised one, “You should look like me.” This dynamic quickly
backslides into an international history of colonialism and imperialism,
conjuring scripts that have endured as methods to oppress people for not
resembling their oppressors. White feminism can be elegant or euphemistic in its
exclusivity. But sometimes it names its racial dominance in plain terms.
When activist Alice Paul began organizing the 1913 Washington Woman
Suffrage Procession, optics were of the utmost importance. Paul and NAWSA
made flags of white, purple, and gold and arranged for an accompanying twenty-
four floats within the procession.1 They recruited women from all over the
country to march, and even led the parade with a striking visual: Inez
Milholland, a prominent speaker and war correspondent, in a Grecian white
robe, cape, and a crown, riding a white horse.2 Later accounts describe her as an
“archangel”3 and a “Joan of Arc-like symbol,”4 who intentionally led the
thousands of marchers5 while she was sitting astride her horse rather than the
customary sidesaddle to broadcast the visual of the New Woman of the
twentieth century: independent and strong, but also elegant and beautiful.
This intentional branding was compromised when Black suffragettes began
to ask if they too were invited to the parade. The Women’s Journal published a
letter to the editor confirming if Black marchers were welcome.6 At the behest of
Paul, a fellow organizer reached out to the editor asking them to “refrain from
publishing anything which can possibly start that [negro] topic at this time.”7
This tactic eventually developed into a wider strategy as female students at the
all-Black Howard University wrote to Paul, saying they would like to come.8
The organizers of the Woman Suffrage Procession were under mandate to “say
nothing whatever about the [negro] question, to keep it out of the papers, [and]
to try to make this a purely Suffrage demonstration entirely uncomplicated by
any other problems.”9 Silence would endure as a white feminist tactic when it
came to exclusivity.
“Other problems” alluded to Paul’s certainty that white Southern suffragettes
would not march with Black women; NAWSA had increasingly attracted
Southern support by going over the Mason–Dixon Line for meetings. This
Southern appeasement was not just isolated to Paul’s parade vision, but rather a
general sentiment from NAWSA leadership. A couple of years before the parade,
NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw was asked by activist Martha Gruening
to denounce white supremacy at a national convention. She had good reason to:
while some NAWSA chapters were inclusive of Black suffragettes, others banned
them.10 At different meetings, as activists and suffragettes brought up issues like
segregation on public transport, leadership politely sidelined them.11 In
response to Gruening, President Shaw emphasized that she was personally “in
favor of colored people voting,” but had reservations about challenging other
women in their movement.12 This is how institutionalized racism develops—
there’s what the individual people believe, and then there is how the
organization functions.
Very important to consider here is that many suffragettes of the previous era,
circa Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were abolitionists—many of them started their
activism from a platform of ending slavery. But, as white feminism would
increasingly demonstrate, there is a marked difference between thinking Black
Americans should be free and believing they should have equal opportunities to
white people. In 1893, NAWSA had passed a resolution under President Susan
B. Anthony that thinly pledged middle- and upper-class white women’s
allegiance to white capitalism if they were to get the right to vote. The resolution
dismissed the rights of immigrant men and women, poor, uneducated white
Americans, as well as Black Americans on the basis of “illiteracy”:
Resolved. That without expressing any opinion on the proper
qualifications for voting, we call attention to the significant facts that in
every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole
number of illiterate male voters, more white women who can read and
write than all negro voters; more American women who can read and
write than all foreign voters; so that the enfranchisement of such women
would settle the vexed questions of rule by illiteracy, whether home-grown
or foreign-born production.13
The parade would mirror this resolution.
While Paul and her fellow organizers had intentionally stayed quiet on Black
participation, Black women groups showed up anyway. Suffragists like Mary
Church Terrell, the president of the National Association of Colored Women,14
and Adella Hunt Logan, a well-known writer, encouraged them to attend. Now,
about a day before the march, Paul and NAWSA had even bigger “other
problems” as they coordinated permits and press coverage: now that Black
women were there, would they bar them? Or segregate the march? At the
rehearsal, organizers made the last-minute decision to segregate. The way Paul
saw it, “we must have a white procession, or a Negro procession, or no
procession at all,” she told an editor.15
The Black suffragettes who had traveled all the way to Washington, D.C. to
convey their allegiance to the female vote were told to go to the back of the
procession—and by feminist advocates.
Journalist Ida B. Wells refused to segregate. She had arrived to the parade
with her all-white Illinois delegates and intended to stay there. But as an
organizer gave another stern warning, Wells reportedly slipped away.16 Her
colleagues assumed she had left. But after the parade started, she reemerged from
the crowd to join her Illinois unit, a moment immortalized by a photographer
for the Chicago Daily Tribune.17
This photograph featuring a Black suffragette in the historic 1913
Washington Woman Suffrage Procession would be an anomaly. The parade was
designed for media attention and the Library of Congress quantifies the coverage
as “easily the single most heavily represented suffrage event” in their archives.18
And yet, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress told me that they
cannot confirm if other Black suffragettes are captured. (“Determining whether
a group of African American suffragists appears in any of the images of crowds is
a larger research project that we do not have the resources to undertake,” she
said.)
That’s because they weren’t supposed to be seen. And if Wells had actually
gone to the back of the line, she probably wouldn’t have been captured either,
despite her prominent career reporting on lynching and organizing on behalf of
suffrage.
To this day, there is no confirmed count of how many Black suffragettes
attended the 1913 parade.19 The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP
that was edited by W. E. B. Du Bois,20 reported that more than forty Black
women marched either with their states or with their professions.21 Twenty-five
students from the Howard sorority Delta Sigma Theta marched.22 And at least
four states had integrated groups: Delaware, Michigan, New York, and, because
of Wells’s evasion of the rules, Illinois.23
Even after the march was over, Paul didn’t seem to have any deeper
understanding as to why it was a drastic omission to exclude or manipulate Black
suffragettes—to essentially brand votes for women as votes for white women. In
fact, the National Women’s History Museum describes her as “annoyed.”24 She
wrote on the subject, “I cannot see… that having this procession without their
participation is in anyway injuring them in the least.”25
But the move had impaired Black women deeply. Even after women’s suffrage
was secured in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Jim Crow
laws like literacy tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, as well as threats of violence
and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan successfully kept Black women from the
polls for decades.26
But the national consensus was nevertheless that votes for women had been
collectively won—and feminist groups like NAWSA, run by women much like
Paul, championed this interpretation. Despite the urging of suffragettes both
Black and white to take a national stand on segregation and racial superiority,
NAWSA did not factor racist barriers into their platform for gender equality.
(This approach set the terrain I sat in 100 years later; newsrooms where poverty
and immigration are somehow not “feminist” topics in a time of resurging
“feminism.”)
Paul would go on to maintain her racism and classism in her next political
endeavor when she founded the National Woman’s Party (NWP) in 1916, the
same NWP Doris Stevens joined. Paul’s big goal was to get an Equal Rights
Amendment, an end to legal distinctions between men and women, into the
federal constitution. But working-class women raised that such a sweeping
amendment could potentially revoke hard-won workplace laws for women.27
Black women also wanted the suffrage campaign to continue until both Black
men and women could vote safely and easily.28 Paul denied both these urgencies;
in her feminism and in the NWP, sexism would be the only focus.29 This was
strategic. “Attempting to deal with issues of class and race, [Paul] said, would
dilute the party’s strength as an advocate for gender equality,” writes Annelise
Orleck in Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics
in the United States, 1900-1965. “This felt like a betrayal to many black and
working-class suffragists, for it left all but white women of the middle and upper
classes out in the cold.”30
Paul’s insistence on sexism only would be an essential and enduring divide
between white feminists and literally everyone else: queer, non-white, and
working-class feminisms. It’s a defining characteristic of white feminist
mobilization in every successive wave, and foundational to how they would
continue to both fight for and envision gender equality.
With the big legislative win of the vote, white feminism would cement an
even darker legacy: blaming other women for not achieving the possibilities that
had been secured for white straight women.
This practice is part of a much larger strategy of dehumanization. Where
dominant cultures have suffocated difference and exported their own values,
colonialism is never that far behind. The dangerous practice of controlling a
body of land, oppressing already existing communities, and mining the
resources for economic gain is the tradition that has caused intergenerational
trauma among people all over the world. Along with that trauma has come a raft
of enduring economic devastation, abuse, assault, addiction, dependency, and
violence that these communities are often blamed for by their oppressors.
That’s what happened to Black American women in 1965 after then assistant
secretary of labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published the now-infamous report
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.31 Known as the “Moynihan
Report,” the review blamed Black women for hindering Black men’s ability to
achieve economic stability because of their “deviant” family structure;32 women
had too much power in the Black American family, inhibiting Black men from
fulfilling their role as primary breadwinner, and that’s why the Black population
was impoverished.
By 1970, this highly influential and deeply racist report proved foundational
to many federal policies that did not account for women, according to the
National Organization for Women (NOW) president at the time, Aileen
Hernandez. But at the time of the report’s publication, a very sensitive moment
during the civil rights movement, the victim-blaming conclusions galvanized
Black women and Black women’s organizations.
NOW (whose first president was Betty Friedan upon its 1966 founding),
however, focused their resources on sex discrimination, petitioning the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to end sex-segregated help-
wanted ads.33 The year after that, NOW came out strongly in support of
legalizing abortion.34 And the year after that, one of their members, Shirley
Chisholm, became the first Black woman elected to the House of
Representatives.35
But much like NAWSA’s inconsistency on race, there were NOW members
actively dedicated to women in poverty. They were just in the minority.
When NOW was founded a year after the Moynihan Report was published,
one of their initial seven task forces was Women in Poverty,36 a platform the
group’s leaders were very vocal about. But, in practice, the task force often found
that NOW simply deferred to the National Welfare Rights Organization
(NWRO), the only group specifically focused on low-income women, on issues
of poverty.37 “This relatively passive stance frustrated the small core of NOW
activists who believed that NOW should recruit more low-income women and
seize the initiative in addressing women in poverty,” writes Martha F. Davis in
Integrating the Sixties.38 The relationship between the organizations is described
as an “arm’s length collaboration”39 where leadership ultimately could not
effectively collaborate because of an inability to “find common ground.”40
As 1970 neared, it’s easy to see why. Under Friedan’s approach to gender
equality, NOW became primarily focused on women working outside the home.
But NWRO believed that women had a right to be valued caregivers and devote
their days to raising children. They opposed NOW’s mandates on mandatory
job-training programs. Davis points out that “confronting the differences
between NOW’s and the NWRO’s perspectives on the importance of women’s
work outside the home might well have accentuated them….”41 But they didn’t.
“Instead of resolving the dispute, NOW leaders glossed over it and limited
themselves to general endorsements of NWRO’s positions.”42
It also didn’t help that NOW became relentlessly fixated on the Equal Rights
Amendment as the route to absolve women of poverty, a clumsy position that
frustrated the NWRO.43
NOW’s docile advocacy on poverty seemed more or less solidified when, for a
conference in 1970, there were no planned events dedicated to discussing low-
income women and their challenges. The coordinator of the task force, Merrillee
Dolan, arrived anyway and offered to lead an impromptu workshop for
attendees. Friedan did an informal survey to see who would attend such an
event. When only two hands were raised, no women in poverty workshop was
held.44 (NOW did not respond to my repeated requests for comment.)
This trajectory would continue through the 1970s. White feminists rallied
around battered women platforms and rape crisis hotlines,45 but in advocating
these laws, they projected that victims fall into a white female paradigm.
Indigenous women in North America have known and continue to know
this very intimately, as the impact of colonialism is responsible for their
following reality: According to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Research
Report released in May 2016, four in every five Native American and Native
Alaskan women have been the victims of violence. More than one in every two
have endured sexual violence.46 And unlike the majority of rape statistics for
non-Native women, Native women generally do not know their attackers prior
to the assault. According to a 2016 report from the National Center for Injury
Prevention and Control of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), 96 percent of Native women rape survivors in the United States have
non-Native attackers.47
What this data mirrors is a distinctly colonial presence in which outsiders are
targeting, stalking, abusing, and murdering Native women on an epidemic scale.
And a lacework of statutes and federal law (colonial laws, basically) prohibits
prosecution. According to High Country News:
Currently, tribal courts do not have the jurisdiction to prosecute non-
tribal members for many crimes like sexual assault and rape, even if they
occur on tribal land. This is a huge issue, because non-Native American
men commit the majority of assaults against Native American women.
There are also few resources for tribal criminal justice systems, little
backup from local law enforcement, and hardly any funding from the
federal government to improve these systems. And all of this contributes
to the exceptionally high rates of sexual and domestic violence.48
This changed slightly in 2013 when the Violence Against Women Act
acknowledged tribal jurisdiction for non-Native perpetrators of domestic
violence and “dating violence” on tribal lands.49 But that expansion did not
include murder, sex trafficking, rape, and child abuse (or most tribes in Alaska or
Maine).50 The slight expansion has been described by the National Indigenous
Women’s Resource Center as “a ray of hope to victims and communities that
safety can be restored.”51 But this is a culture that severely needs more than a ray
of hope, and has for some time.
For nearly four decades, Native and Indigenous activists have been calling for
federal resources to end the epidemic of missing and murdered women and girls
(often cited as #MMIW, #MMIWG, or #MMIWG2S52). For years, across
generations, Indigenous families routinely lose family members and members of
their community to outside predators (according to a 2018 study by the Urban
Indian Health Institute (UIHI), a tribal epidemiology center, Native American
women are murdered at a rate of ten times the national average),53 and the
government that took their land, their resources, their skills, their culture,
reassembled their families, took away their children, and has blamed them for
their addiction rates allocates little to this crisis. The United States doesn’t even
federally quantify these missing lives. That’s how little they matter.
In 2018, a report from the Urban Indian Health Institute asked seventy-one
American cities for numbers of missing Native American women. Almost two-
thirds of the police departments either couldn’t confirm an accurate number,
didn’t respond, or admitted that they could not confirm the race of victims.54
The report quantified the unconfirmed data—directly from the police
departments—as having “significant compromises,” while some agencies tried to
recount these deaths by human memory because the records were so incomplete.
Annita Lucchesi, the executive director of Sovereign Bodies Institute and a
woman of Southern Cheyenne descent,55 said of the failure to confirm this
essential information:
It is unacceptable that law enforcement feel recalling data from memory is
an adequate response to a records request. In the one instance where this
occurred and the officer searched their records after, several additional
cases the officer could not recall were found. This highlights the need for
improved records provision standards and shows that the institutional
memory of law enforcement is not a reliable or accurate data source.56
Based on a 2018 report by the Urban Indian Health Institute, The Guardian
reported in 2019 that there were 5,712 cases of MMIW, but only 116 of these
cases were entered into the Department of Justice database.57 In reporting on
the epidemic, local news outlet Tucson.com underscored how the lack of regard
for Indigenous women and girls goes hand in hand with lack of consistent
information gathering:
There is no comprehensive count of how many indigenous women go
missing or are victims of homicide, in part because different law
enforcement agencies have no uniform method of tracking this data, no
interagency tracking and often don’t track data based on both race and
gender.58
Conversely, Canada, with whom the United States shares a colonial presence on
Turtle Island, or North America, released a sprawling federal report in 2019
attempting to quantify the scale of the abductions, rapes, and murders.59 This
herculean effort came at the behest of activists, advocating for an inquiry into an
epidemic that the nation would not recognize. Despite the 700-plus pages,
detailed interviews with Elders, community leaders, and victims’ families, the
Canadian National Inquiry acknowledges that the exact number is lost to time:
The truth is, despite the National Inquiry’s best efforts to gather all of
these truths, we conclude that no one knows an exact number of missing
and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada. Thousands of
women’s deaths or disappearances have likely gone unrecorded over the
decades, and many families likely did not feel ready or safe to share with
the National Inquiry before our timelines required us to close registration.
One of the most telling pieces of information, however, is the amount of
people who shared about either their own experiences or their loved ones’
publicly for the first time. Without a doubt, there are many more.60
The report directly addresses the missing Indigenous women and girls epidemic
as a “genocide,” enacted by colonialism, structural violence, and the failure of
justice systems. These violent deaths are the result of an ongoing colonial
presence, “a crisis centuries in the making.” They assert that “the process of
colonization has, in fact, created the conditions for the ongoing crisis of missing
and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA [two-spirit,
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual]
people that we are confronting today.”
The report, which reads more like a thoughtful dissertation than any parallel
report on violence I’ve read in the United States, analyzes how colonial
interpretations of power have engineered and facilitated this genocide. The
authors assert that we convey truths about:
… state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies,
built on the presumption of superiority, and utilized to maintain power
and control over the land and the people by oppression and, in many
cases, by eliminating them.
To begin countering these dangerous, violent, and pervasive repercussions, the
National Inquiry advocates developing a “decolonizing mindset” that “requires
people to consciously and critically question the legitimacy of the colonizer and
reflect on the ways we have been influenced by colonialism.”
What this initiative actively requires is a reinterpretation of power from the
powerful, particularly on the state and federal level in which the Canadian
government has asserted their dominance. But this strategy is not limited to
those avenues to literal power, legislation, federal funds, and policy-making. The
writers point out, “This includes Canada’s Western, white-dominant,
mainstream culture, where racist attitudes and forced assimilation policies are
both examples of cultural violence, since it stems from racist beliefs deeply
embedded in Canadian culture.”
The report prompts Canada to reconsider their assumed supremacy as a
colonial, Western nation (a similar claim asserted by Latin American feminists
when Doris Stevens refused to relinquish control of their agenda), and at the
urgency of women’s lives. But white feminism has shared these colonial,
supremacist ambitions—both by the inaction cited in the National Inquiry
report, but also by an adoption of this colonial narrative to articulate their own
ascent to rights and therefore power.
There is a “lack of moral outrage in the U.S. on this issue,”61 writes Dr.
Margaret Moss, director of the First Nations House of Learning, which is
further detailed in Jen Deerinwater’s 2017 piece “How White Feminists Fail as
Native Allies in the Trump Era.” The journalist, founder, and executive director
of Crushing Colonialism,62 an Indigenous media project, writes of the post-
Trump feminist awakening in the United States:
I once strongly identified as a feminist, but the hypocrisy of the feminist
movement has pushed me away. My people, the Tsalagi, never needed
feminism before white, christian men invaded our lands. We were
matrilineal and matriarchal. Our women had power, safety, and love. It is
only as a result of white invasion that feminism is supposedly needed; that
is, ameriKKKan feminism is merely one more way in which the white
settlers have forced themselves upon us. Native Women no more need
feminism than we need colonialism and christianity.
Moreover, white feminists seem only to remember us when they want
to appropriate and misconstrue our pre-colonizer ways—which placed
balance between the genders and instilled respect for our women—for
their own ends. Or, when white women want to feel like a special
snowflake, they make false claims to our tribes, as Blake Lively[63] and
Senator Warren[64] have done.
At the same time, these same white feminists expect us to be eternally
thankful that they signed a petition or took valuable resources away from
us by sitting on their privileged asses at the Dakota Access Pipeline
(DAPL) resistance camps.
Far too many white women think that having worn a white pant suit to
vote for Hillary abstains them from being destructive to other women. In
reality, however, it proves that they place their rights above those of
Indigenous and other marginalized women…. The violence Native People
face is not new—and it didn’t take Trump to make us woke and fight
back. We’ve been fighting for the rights of all women since 1492.
However, the same can’t be said for white women.65
Deerinwater elaborates on the growing awareness of rape culture in the United
States and how Native women have been left out of this recognition, despite
how high their assault and murder rates are:
While white women are quick to rally against the injustices in rape cases
where they’ve been or can see themselves being abused and experiencing
institutional oppression—such as Brock Turner’s—they go silent when it
comes to the violation of Native Women. When I’ve repeatedly raised the
issue of the horrifically high rates of violence against Native Women I have
either been ignored by the mainstream feminist organizations, such as
Ultraviolet and the National Organization of Women, or have been told
that we are somehow responsible for our assaults. A colonizer/“feminist”
tweeted to me that if the abuse on our reservations were so high, why
didn’t we just leave? This statement is ignorant and insulting. As if we
should give up what’s left of our lands. As if the abuse we suffer is in our
control, and as such, our fault. By this logic white women should stop
attending college so they’re less likely to be raped.66
NOW and Ultraviolet did not return repeated requests for comment.
In an earlier piece in 2016, Deerinwater made similar observations about who
was being factored into national conversations about rape and sexual assault.
The enduring violence inflicted on Native and Indigenous women was not a
prominent part of these women’s issues platforms, raising crucial questions
about who is the “woman” that “women’s rights” are crafted for:
Both Democrats and Republicans have remained virtually silent on the
national stage in the face of the terrifyingly high rates of rape, sexual
trafficking, disappearance, and murder of Native and Indigenous Women.
They have remained silent, including President Obama and Democratic
Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton, while Native Girls and Women are
being attacked by dogs, mace, paramilitary law enforcement, and the
National Guard at Standing Rock. They remained silent while Trump
was denigrating all Native Girls and Women by using such slurs as
Pocahont*as and squaw. Only when those in power could envision their
mothers, wives, daughters, or themselves being Trump’s victim had he
gone too far. Only when they could envision a woman of similar to their
own class being a victim, did they care about sexual assault.67
The Guardian reported in 2016 that, indeed, Native American women were
“leading the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline”68 at Standing Rock,
often subjected to teargas, rubber bullets, Mace, and arrest. “Hundreds of
women” and two-spirit people reportedly were attempting to protect “the basic
human right to clean water.” And in addition to physically putting their bodies
in front of the land that was taken from them through colonial processes, the
women water protectors were reported to also be “core spiritual leaders” who
strategized how to protect their resources from the pipeline.
And yet despite #NoDAPL coverage across Glamour.com, MarieClaire.com,
Vogue.com, HarpersBazaar.com, Cosmopolitan.com, and others, “conquering”
still remains, and has remained, a pervasive vehicle to articulate mainstream
feminist and white feminist objectives. A 2015 post on EverydayFeminism.com
carries the headline “If We Divide, We Don’t Conquer: 3 Reasons Why
Feminists Need to Talk About Race.”69 An article on EllevateNetwork.com, a
professional networking site for women, reads “Divide and Conquer: Feminist
Style and why Patricia Arquette is Right.”70
Beyond women-centric outlets, it’s clear that feminism fitting into a narrative
of “conquering” the culture or male-dominated industries is how, as readers, we
are being asked to understand gender equality. CollectorsWeekly.com, an online
resource for antique collectors, has a piece from 2014 that reads “Women Who
Conquered the Comics World,”71 while a 2015 Salon piece profiles “The
Woman Who Conquered Porn.”72 A Telegraph article explains “How Feminism
Conquered Pop Culture”73 in 2014 (featuring lead art of all white women with
Beyoncé on the second page). A 2017 piece on Vox.com analyzing the feminist
plotlines of fictional female characters like Princess Leia, Xena, and Buffy the
Vampire Slayer from “popular geek franchises” makes the point:
Modern understanding of how female characters fit into larger cultural
narratives has evolved largely in response to our increased understanding
of how sexism manifests in fiction. In many ways, fictional female
characters have already fought and conquered battlegrounds that women
are still fighting in real life.74
Again and again, through this messaging, “conquering” is affirmed as a positive,
a progressive step, a key to feminist strategy or organizing. And yet, this is a
mindset, a way of seeing people, resources, communities, and cultures that has
wrought multigenerational devastation, trauma, and violence against Native,
Indigenous, and First Nations women and girls—as well as many, many other
civilizations internationally.
Once again, white feminist ambition—even the way they communicate that
ambition to each other—carries on the brutal tradition of exploiting,
suppressing, and dominating others for personal or strategic gain. Whether it’s
for themselves, their companies, their business enterprises, or their families,
white feminism’s willingness to adopt a “conqueror” understanding of their
rights and power, specifically unconsciously, underscores the vast ideological
space between white feminist ideology and what Native women and two-spirit
people have been organizing against for centuries.
Of this divide, journalist and Cherokee activist Rebecca Nagle observed on
her podcast This Land, “The cruel irony of being Native American in 2019 is we
survived genocide only to be treated as if we are invisible. But we’re still here.”75

Chapter Four
Thinking as a Collective

ONE OF THE PROMINENT reasons white feminist ideology is well poised to step
into a conqueror’s narrative, and think nothing of it, is that their bedrock of
empowerment is almost uniformly individualistic. This is the dimension of
white feminism that most cleanly exhibits its influence, in that building capital,
money, influence, power is an independent endeavor.
White feminists have understood their rights in these terms since the 1850s,
when feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony chose to
concentrate on education and political advances that were of little impact to the
daily lives of working-class and poor women—women who cleaned homes,
cared for children, and picked cotton.1 So, while white feminists faded into elite
circles, non-elite women built their own movements for their immediate needs.
A hallmark of many grassroots movements shunned by white feminism,
across multiple and intersecting identities, is that they put forward collective
rights before an individual’s progress. Communities having access to clean water,
to education, to public spaces, to institutions, to food are valued over a single
person’s ascent, success, or acceptance. This is a completely different way of
envisioning and demanding equality.
The lengthy history of consumer activism by working-class, immigrant,
Jewish, and housewives of color in the United States is a prominent window into
this approach—moments where these women simply stopped buying stuff to
enact change. By a number of communities refusing to buy something,
capitalism was impacted. And where money determines literally everything in a
capitalist framework, changing who gets your money has the capacity to be
radical—as long as other people work with you.
In 1902, Jewish housewives in New York City’s Lower East Side learned that
kosher meat would be inflated from 12 cents a pound to a whopping 18 cents a
pound. The price inflation was not determined by the local shopkeepers, who
also initially resisted the price increase, but by “The Meat Trust,” the
corporations that controlled the meat market.2
Jewish women heard this and collectively told the Meat Trust that they could
keep their pricey meat. They weren’t going to buy it. Two women, known as
Mrs. Levy, the wife of a cloak maker, and Mrs. Edelson, a restaurant owner,
called a meeting with other wives and mothers to coordinate a meat boycott.
Most important to note is that these weren’t women who had previously
participated in the labor movement, nor were they particularly young, child-free,
and idealistic. Most of these ladies were well into their thirties and many had
upward of four children to care for. But their lack of formal experience or
extensive household responsibilities and childcare did not deter them from
advocating on behalf of what they interpreted as an outrageous affront to a basic
human need. All over the Lower East Side, women spread the word that the
meat boycott was on. They distributed (and designed) fliers in Yiddish with a
skull and crossbones that read, “Eat no meat while the Trust is taking meat from
the bones of your women and children.”3
They also began rioting, bringing physical attention to the boycott by
throwing meat into the streets, bricks through windows, and reportedly pulling
meat away from customers. As women, this led to other upsets in their
community—the Jewish men didn’t necessarily think their women should be
behaving this way in public. To protest this patriarchal assessment of their
activism, and to further make the point that this endeavor was essential to their
families and homes, women reportedly walked out of a local synagogue during a
Torah reading.4 As the men in their community continued to tsk-tsk their
disrespect for order, protocol, and their faith, Jewish housewives strengthened
the commitment to their cause. According to a 2019 Tablet.com piece:
When a man told Mrs. Silver, one of the women who led the synagogue
protest, that she had chutzpah and her action was a hillul Hashem (a
desecration of God’s name), she coolly replied that the Torah would
pardon her. Women marched and shouted, “We will not be silent; we will
overturn the world” and called themselves “soldiers in the great women’s
war.”5
The riots continued with police presence escalating. The women meat
boycotters made it clear that they were willing to physically fight back and
resisted police efforts. Of the riots, the New York Times described the chaotic
scene as “Old shoes, brushes, combs, brooms, and every other imaginable
portable article of household use rained down upon the pavement.”6 Over
seventy women were arrested, and when some of them were brought before a
magistrate, he reportedly told them that they did not understand the beef
market. More tsk-tsking, and now by the men outside their community too.
(The women went door to door raising money for one another’s bail.)
The media channels, and archives by which we understand this protest, are
also severely tainted by classism, xenophobia, and sexism. Tablet.com points out
that the women protestors were described as “very ignorant,” and that “they
mostly speak a foreign language.” The Times’ reporting of the riots also makes
sure to tell us that the police struck and beat the women gently with their
batons, in case you need further clarification on who the press was looking to
protect and glorify.
By the end of the month, Jewish men decided to show up and participate in
the boycott too. And by early June, the Meat Trust relented. They lowered the
price of meat to less than 14 cents a pound. As it turns out, these Jewish
housewives knew exactly how the meat market worked, more so than the senior
leaders of both their faith and their courts—and it only took around a month to
enact this change.
Meat would continue to be a centralizing point for women in consumer
activism in the United States for several decades to come. Housewives refusing
to participate in daily commerce, for staples and cornerstones of their
households, would reverse the power structure based on what that structure
values most: money.
What’s also significant about housewife consumer activism is that this
strategy would become interracial. In the 1930s, as Americans were grappling
with the Great Depression, Black and Jewish housewives effectively closed four
thousand butcher shops in New York by picketing.7 This boycott was spurred
by the efforts of like-minded women in Hamtramck, Michigan, who were
demanding a 20 percent reduction in meat prices from the “meatmen,” butcher
shops, and the city’s meatpackers. The price of meat had reportedly risen 62
percent in three years,8 and during a time when many, many Americans were
struggling to keep jobs and feed families. (The butchers maintained that the
price increase was caused by President Roosevelt, who had implemented a
processing tax, rather than commercial interests.) In what started as a five-
hundred-women protest in July 1935, the meat boycott would continue
through the summer, with protestors eventually occupying more than two miles
and spilling over into Detroit.
Mary Zuk, a petite woman, wife, and mother, led the protestors. The thirty-
two-year-old was first-generation Polish American and, like a lot of American
women during the Depression, her husband had lost his job within the local
auto industry. With two children and an unemployed husband, Zuk found
herself trying to economize feeding a household and struggling with meat prices.
She came to social justice because she had to—there was no other way to ensure
that her children could eat regularly.
Prior to picketing, Zuk was elected head of the Committee for Action
Against the High Cost of Living. She and the committee rolled up to a city
council meeting, where the mayor was present, and put forth a request to have
meat prices investigated by the federal government. Later that week, they started
the boycott, carrying signs that read “Strike Against High Meat Prices. Don’t
Buy.” Echoing the legacy of the Jewish housewives’ boycott in 1902, Zuk and
her fellow boycotters were willing to pull meat from the hands of consumers and
throw goods into the streets. By the first day of their boycott, the protestors had
cost a $65,000 profit loss for local butchers, the equivalent in purchasing power
of about $1.2 million in 2019.9 That’s basically not here to play money.
The meatmen were scared, and that was reflected in temporary reductions in
meat within the shops but still no fixed reduction. The protestors kept up the
boycott through the summer and shops continued to suffer and close. The
butchers then sought the aid of the state’s governor and an injunction to prevent
the ladies from protesting (good luck with that). But, to Governor Frank
Fitzgerald’s credit, he maintained that the protestors warranted federal oversight
into their claims.
So Zuk went to Washington, D.C., with every intention of explaining their
plight to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace—but that guy didn’t even
show up. (It’s been reported that Wallace never had any intention of hearing the
protestors speak about the meat boycott.) Zuk only got his attention when,
upon a meeting with a different official, she said she would not leave the office
until Wallace arrived. And so he did, in full view of reporters, whom he tried to
negotiate out of the room, until Zuk delivered this epic smackdown: “Our
people want to know what we say and they want to know what you say, so the
press people are going to stay.”
Initially, Wallace maintained that the high meat prices were due to a national
shortage, but Zuk was adamant that it was the government processing tax under
Roosevelt that was lining the pockets of meatpackers while children went
hungry. She demanded a ban on this processing tax and also pointed out,
“Doesn’t the government want us to live? Everything in Detroit has gone up
except wages.” And in response to this, Wallace literally ran away from his own
office.10 He bolted from the 100-pound, unarmed, first-generation American
Polish woman because she asked him a direct question—that’s how power gets
subverted.
The federal government never did intervene on the issue of high meat prices
in Hamtramck. In what is now a common tactic to undermine political change,
a Democratic congressman from Missouri, Clarence Cannon, stipulated that the
lady meat boycotters weren’t really working class or struggling financially (for a
contemporary example, see right-wing conspiracy assertions that the Sandy
Hook victims and parents are “fake” or actors). Congressman Cannon declared
that the women protestors were a front for the meatpackers themselves who
wanted to abolish the tax for their own business incentives. He called for an
investigation into the lady meat boycott as, according to his assessment, the
women looked too “bridge club” to be working class. He produced photos of
the protestors on the House floor, pointing to their hairstyles, pearls, shoes, and
purses as proof of the fact that they “were spoiled housewives who sought
pleasure from throwing public fits,” according to Narratively.com.11
Congressman Cannon declared the boycott “fake,” also on the grounds that
he deemed it unfeasible for women to organize on their own without the
guidance of men. This propaganda did not impede the velocity of the boycott.
As summer waned, housewives in other cities began hearing of the tactics from
the women in Michigan and were strategizing on how to implement meat
boycotts of their own.
The boycott continued through 1936, even after the court ruled that the
picketers could not physically obstruct businesses or approaching customers.
That year, the tax was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and local
meat prices in Hamtramck were maintained at a feasible price, thanks to the
work of local women. Zuk went on to serve on Hamtramck City Council, the
first woman to ever hold a seat, and expanded her efforts to fair housing, utility
expenses, and other food prices.
After the Depression, meat boycotts would grow as an effective form of
protest, led by women. In 1947, nineteen women’s organizations called for
Congress to establish caps on housing, meat, milk, and bread. The war was over
and yet it was still too expensive to sustain their families. They made this known
by flooding the offices of congressmen and senators in Washington, D.C.—
1,629 housewives from all over the country: Trenton, Boston, Baltimore,
Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. They proposed to their
representatives a bill to control national rents, public housing, and food prices.12
When Congress did exactly nothing, the housewives went back to their
respective cities and launched a nationwide meat boycott, which, according to
historian Orleck, “dwarfed even the huge depression-era actions.” The 1948
meat boycott is credited with starting in the home of Mrs. R. D. Vaughn, a
seventy-year-old grandmother in Texas who called all her friends (many homes
now had telephones) and urged them not to buy meat from their local shops
until prices dropped. Forty-eight hours later, meat boycotts emerged in
seventeen Texan towns and cities. Within the week, the meat boycott had
expanded to Florida and Georgia. It would eventually include New Jersey, New
York, Michigan, and Ohio.13
A prominent pillar of this fast mobilization was housewives’ access to
telephones, as prior to the 1940s, meat boycotters had to organize much more
slowly and convey their message by either going door-to-door or distributing
fliers, as the Jewish women in 1902 did. But with even poorer families having a
telephone, they could communicate strategy, principle, and action much faster.
And also, recruit. One housewife in Ohio explained to a reporter that, as a sort
of phone tree, they would assign fifty-eight women ten pages each of the phone
directory. (This strategy of women’s organizing follows a through line to social
media, in which digitally based movements like #YesAllWomen,

SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and #MeToo can go national and sometimes

even international in a matter of hours.) Mommy/baby picket lines also proved
to be very effective, and in Brooklyn, 150,000 housewives boycotted meat.14 In
1951, the New York Times reported that Chicago housewives had forced a 60
percent drop in a specific neighborhood.15
Livestock prices eventually dropped 10 percent by federal mandate16 and, in
a rare moment of mainstream media clarity, the impetus was identified as “angry
housewives”17 (backhanded, but accurate). This recognition of housewives as
the driving force within consumer activism would continue to be recognized. In
the national boycott of 1973, in which meat prices had risen 20 percent in one
year thanks to inflation, Time magazine immortalized the standoff between
American housewives and livestock producers with a spring cover story.18 But,
much like the New York Times’ reporting of the Jewish housewives in 1902, you
can see the media bias and influence at work in the cover illustration. Reporting
of this time details participation and price scrutiny from Latina housewives19
and Black housewives in Harlem, including the support of Florence Rice,20 a
Black consumer activist and considered the leader of the Harlem Consumer
Movement. But Time boils the visual of the boycott down to this: a white-
passing, thin housewife with all the markers of middle class. She carries a purse
(granted, it appears empty) that matches her yellow headband. And as menacing
as she is supposed to be with her “Don’t eat meat!” sign, arched eyebrows, and
aggressive stance, you get the sense that if she wasn’t boycotting meat, she would
lovingly serve it to you.
The ways in which activist movements get translated often says more about
the editorial interpretation of these calls for justice than the reality. The initiative
to place a thin, white-passing housewife as the singular visual marker of this type
of consumer activism—which is deeply rooted in the efforts of Black, Chicano,
and immigrant women—signals who you should think about when you
consider the call for lower meat prices. Not a woman like Dolores Huerta, who
had organized the successful 1965 Delano strike that resulted in an
unprecedented renegotiation of workers’ rights.21 You’re supposed to think
about a woman who is conventionally feminine, who carries a purse, who is
thin, who is performing both gender and race as society dictates she should. She
is calling for the meat boycott. And therefore, it is a worthy cause. A single image
accomplishes this messaging—and has for much of the history of media. (The
image of Gloria Steinem has often functioned this way as a shorthand for a lot of
gendered issues.)
Despite mainstream media’s missteps in reporting feminism on the ground,
this exhilarating thread of women’s activism consistently practices a political
ideology that does not hinge on one of their own ascending classes. This strategy
does not interpret increased individual resources as a social justice win for all.
For Zuk and the other women boycotters, this endeavor was not about escaping
the confines of being working class, but about protecting the rights of the
working class. What this strategy innately relies on is the foremost recognition
that poor and working-class people have and deserve rights in the first place—
and aren’t plagues on society who are lazy, unwilling to apply themselves, or
should, through some elaborate matrix and suspension of systemic blockades,
simply not be working class. Existing in this socioeconomic bracket with these
intrinsic financial realities was a legitimate life, across their families as well as
their neighbors. And this communal approach to understanding their needs and
successes was anchored deeply in protecting food prices for everyone rather than
reverse engineering their individual lives to accommodate the price hike.
A community understanding of justice was inherent to these women meat
boycotters, but also to the time, observes Emily E. LB. Twarog, a labor historian
and author of Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in
Twentieth-Century America. In an interview with TheAtlantic.com in 2017, she
pointed out the shift in how Americans conceive of not just each other but,
more pointedly, the people who have less:
Now, the perception is usually that if someone’s struggling financially, it’s
the problem of that individual worker. Certainly under Ronald Reagan
there was a real shift towards talking about the public as individual
taxpayers, versus a body of consumers. That has had, over time, a great
impact on the psyche of the American public, since they’re no longer
being referred to as a collective by the mainstream media.22
For more privileged women in the United States, this approach to
understanding affronts to community has exceeded their own socioeconomic
status and race. The important anti-racist work of white women in the United
States has left a strong and valuable legacy on the ways to be a feminist who is
white, as opposed to a white feminist. Dotted across history, but mostly
congregated in the American South, there have existed white women who saw
segregation, lynchings, beatings, and repeated denigration of Black Americans
and took up combating racism as their collective responsibility. Across a
spectrum of professions, personal reflections, and societal observations, these
anti-racist white women deemed white supremacy their priority specifically
because they were white, once again evoking a reconsideration of power by the
powerful. Much like Canada’s report on MMIWG from the previous chapter,
these activists assessed that power and racial dominance, as white people, had to
be analyzed and undone.
Anne McCarty Braden, a journalist and white anti-racist activist born to a
middle-class family in Kentucky in the 1920s before moving to very racially
segregated Alabama, quantified her motivation this way:
No white person, then as now, can be neutral on this question [of
segregation]. Either you find a way to oppose the evil or the evil becomes a
part of you and you are a part of it, and it winds itself around your soul
like the arms of an octopus…. There was no middle ground.23
Her family was pro-segregation, a day-to-day practice she was completely and
culturally immersed in given that her family was considered elite Southerners. To
historians’ accounts, Braden was nevertheless not quite sold on segregation, even
as a young girl, and began to question the validity of “the Negro problem,” as it
was always presented to her, in church. She later remembered:
I made some mild comment that it seemed to me people ought to be
treated equal no matter what color they were. And I can remember people
looking a little startled and then somebody coming up to me later and
saying, “You shouldn’t say things like that, people will think you’re a
communist.”24
Braden, though, kept saying things like that—and it cost her a lot more than her
social reputation among other Southern churchgoers. In 1951, she protested
what she believed to be the wrongful execution and conviction of a Black man
for raping a white woman. She was arrested and, to her memory, the police
officer was incensed to see a white, Southern woman protesting racial
discrimination, of all things. She remembers her encounter with the officer as
nearly escalating to violence given her politics, but also revealing to her what
privileges and protections of whiteness she was ultimately losing by taking a
stand:
He said, “And you’re in here, and you’re a southerner, and you’re on this
thing!?” And he turned around like he was going to hit me, but he didn’t
because this other cop stopped him… All of a sudden that was a very
revealing moment to me. All of my life police had been on my side. I
didn’t think of it that way, but police didn’t bother you, you know, in the
world where I grew up. All of a sudden I realized that I was on the other
side. He had said, “You’re not a real southern woman.” And I said, “No, I
guess I’m not your kind of southern woman.”25
This “other side” she alludes to, which did not include a safe, societal
infrastructure for white women, was a concept she further elaborated on when
reflecting on the decisions she had made in her life, saying:
An older, African American leader that I respected highly told me I had to
make a choice: be a part of the world of the lynchers or join the Other
America—of people from the very beginning of this country who
opposed injustice, and especially opposed racism and slavery.26
The costs of joining that “Other America” and not maintaining the certainty of
white supremacy were grave for these anti-racist white women activists. Like
Juliette Hampton Morgan, a Southern socialite from Montgomery, Alabama,
who compromised the security of her parents’ name and standing in Southern
aristocracy when she came out against segregation on Montgomery buses. A
cross was burned on her lawn. She received consistent hate mail, threatening
phone calls, and was estranged from virtually all her friends, most of her family,
and employers who were pressured to fire her for her views.27 Of this
harassment, she recalled, “The cuts from old friends, the ringing telephone with
anonymous voices; I know how it feels when the butterflies in your stomach
start turning to buzzards.”28
Morgan had been set up for conventional success by white privilege,
influence, and the power of her family (her parents were friends with other
influential Southerners like Tallulah Bankhead and Zelda Fitzgerald). She
graduated in the top five percent of her class at the University of Alabama, where
she earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. She became a public
school teacher and, later, a librarian in addition to a writer. A place where
Morgan was not so privileged, though, was her mental health. She struggled
immensely with depression and panic attacks and, due to her anxiety, could not
drive. So she took the bus. And it was there, on Montgomery buses, that she
witnessed firsthand the denigration of Black patrons who would be relegated to
the back.
In 1939, she began writing letters to her local newspaper, the Montgomery
Advertiser, detailing how inhumane segregation was on the buses. As she penned
these criticisms and sent them off, Morgan received the first of what would be
many harsh pushbacks of white supremacy. The bookstore where Morgan was
employed fired her.29
On a particular bus ride of note, Morgan watched as a Black woman paid her
fare, was told to enter the bus via the back entrance, and then, as she stepped off
the front of the bus, the driver attempted to speed away. Morgan got up and
yanked the emergency brake, lambasting the driver for leaving the Black patron
behind after she paid and demanding that she be let on. Pulling the emergency
break when she witnessed ill-treatment toward Black riders would be an
enduring strategy for Morgan, and one that bus drivers responded to with
mockery. Other white riders didn’t back her up or follow her lead. They mocked
her too.
Morgan would later identify the sinister nature of white decency as “our
biggest problem.”30 The pressure to maintain etiquette, respectability, and
decorum kept too many white people in Montgomery complaisant. In a letter
published in the Tuscaloosa News in 1957, she observed just how singular she
was in her outrage:
I had begun to wonder if there were any men in the state—any white men
—with any sane evaluation of our situation here in the middle of the
twentieth century, with any good will, and most especially any moral
courage to express it.30
The publication of that letter provoked the wrath of white supremacist
organizations as well as library patrons who boycotted where she worked. I can
see why. Morgan’s appeal to morality grabs at the currency often used by racists
to justify segregation and propriety. “Morals” is the campaign they erect with
mothers and children, asking other concerned white parents in low voices if they
would want their babies sharing resources, common spaces, and drinking
fountains with kids from those neighborhoods. It’s the sweet way of saying “the
Negro problem” without it sounding particularly accusatory. Couching racism
in morality has been very effective and instrumental in spreading it, and when
Morgan made an editorial play for that same sentiment in practicing anti-racism,
white supremacists organized quickly to suffocate it.
They exhibited the same vehemence against writer Lillian Eugenia Smith,
author of the 1944 bestselling novel Strange Fruit, which detailed an interracial
romance and ample criticism of segregation. Like Morgan, Smith was born to an
affluent Southern family. She studied music and went on to become the head of
the music department at an American Methodist school in China. While
overseeing the instruction of Chinese girls, she observed the white colonialist
approach to her students. When she came back to the United States to care for
her ailing parents (and fall in love with her long-term female partner, Paula
Snelling), she noticed that the treatment of Black Americans seemed to be
informed by the same ideology.31
Upon the publication of Strange Fruit, Boston and Detroit banned the novel
and the United States Postal Service refused to even ship it. But First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt urged her husband and president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
to intervene so that the book could continue to find readers.32 The same year
that Strange Fruit was published, Smith wrote to the Southern Regional
Council that “Segregation is spiritual lynching,”33 and urged Southerners to be
reflective of their own racism. In Smith’s 1949 autobiographical book Killers of
a Dream, she places the onus on Southern whites to evaluate their own patterns
of abuse and discrimination, writing, “The secret history of race relations in the
South, the fears and the dreads, are tied up with the secret habits of
southerners.”34 The strength in Smith’s analysis is that “the Negro problem”
Braden spoke of, that Morgan resisted, is actually a white people problem.
Recasting racial dynamics under this accusatory lens was met with violence and
arson. In 1955, Smith’s house was burned down by segregationists.
Through this anti-racist work, white gender roles were also being challenged.
Defying the culturally sanctioned role of what a white Southern woman should
be, these white female activists both questioned the societal powers but also
upset them. Much like the consumer activism of the twentieth century, white
supremacy has traditionally relied on women on the ground to carry out its
bidding, particularly in the form of grassroots movements, newsletters, PTA
meetings, bake sales, and community efforts.35 Southern white women stepping
away from this order, and this performance of gender, threatens the very
economy of institutionalized racism and, on some level, white supremacists
know this. Which is why a Southern white cop wants to hit Braden for
recognizing a racist conviction and Morgan is teased by bus drivers for caring
about Black riders.
Keeping the order of respectability, as Morgan wrote, is paramount to
whiteness, but especially female whiteness—the great bastions of morality,
civility, and family values. Stepping away from that gendered and racial code of
conduct meant being labeled “a race traitor,” as Braden said about her own
confrontations with segregationists. Feminist and anti-racist activist Mab Segrest
describes this exact dynamic well in her memoir, Memoir of a Race Traitor:
Fighting Racism in the American South, writing, “It’s not my people, it’s the idea
of race I’m betraying. It’s taken me a while to get the distinction.”36
Collective understandings of social justice have also garnered milestone
legislative action where a singular success narrative could not. The 504 Sit-In in
San Francisco produced legislation that is considered “the birth of the disability
rights movement,”37 according to activist Kitty Cone, who led a twenty-six-day
occupation of a federal building in 1977 with 150 other disability activists.38
Their demands were simple: they would not leave the premises until President
Jimmy Carter’s administration signed and implemented section 504 of the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973.39 This act was the first federal civil rights protection
for Americans with disabilities, a very important piece of legislation that
prohibited discrimination of disabled people for federal programs, agencies, and
employment. But section 504, which drew on the language of other civil rights
laws, took that initiative a step further by recognizing that disabled individuals
could not be discriminated against.40
This flipped an important cultural stigma for disabled people that courses
through many workplace, education, housing, medical facility, transportation,
and bigoted conversations today: that to be disabled is the fault and personal
responsibility of the person, rather than indicative of an infrastructure, a system
that prioritizes a presumed standard of wellness in everyday living.
Cone, who had muscular dystrophy, wrote that implementing section 504
was essential in, once again, incentivizing the powerful—the able-bodied—to
rethink how they had quantified a disability as an individual problem. She
wrote:
People with disabilities, ourselves didn’t think the issues we faced in our
daily lives were the product of prejudice and discrimination. Disability
had been defined by the medical model of rehabilitation, charity and
paternalism. If I thought about why I couldn’t attend a university that
was inaccessible, I would have said it was because I couldn’t walk, my own
personal problem. Before section 504, responsibility for the consequences
of disability rested only on the shoulders of the person with a disability
rather than being understood as a societal responsibility. Section 504
dramatically changed that societal and legal perception.
Only with section 504 was the role of discrimination finally legally
acknowledged.41
What this measure ultimately required was regulations—basically guidelines—so
that hospitals, schools, libraries, and other buildings could enact them. But
between when the act passed in 1973 through 1977, courts, judges, and
Congress could not agree on what these regulations would be. Meanwhile,
disabled people were waiting to participate in these public spaces based on passed
legislation. Proposed changes to pass section 504 were also considered so
dramatic that they would have severely diluted the mandate for
nondiscrimination.
So, a number of activists decided to stop waiting. They assembled the
Emergency 504 Coalition to coordinate a rally followed by a sit-in at the United
States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) building in San
Francisco, as well as sit-ins in eight other cities. The plan for the San Francisco
sit-in was they would not leave the HEW building until HEW’s new secretary,
Joseph Califano Jr., signed the regulations for section 504.
Cone and Judy Heumann, another disability rights activist, focused on
engineering the San Francisco sit-in for longevity with various committees
focused on publicity, outreach, fundraising, and medics. Organizing a
demonstration with disabled people also presented particular challenges that the
coalition had to plan for. Cone remembers:
The committees had a great deal of work to do and kept many people
involved. This was good, because the conditions were physically grueling,
sleeping sometimes three or four hours a night on the floor and everyone
was under stress about their families, jobs, our health, the fact that we
were all filthy and so on.42
Cone and Heumann were very tactical in their assembly, drawing extensively on
their respective experiences as organizers but also on the organization of other
disenfranchised people. Heumann, who was in a wheelchair following a polio
diagnosis as a child, had advocated for increased accessibility to classrooms and
dormitories while a student at Long Island University, as well as her own ability
to teach in a classroom; she often won. She is acknowledged as the first person in
a wheelchair to teach elementary school in New York City. Through her
activism, she had developed partnerships with the Black Panthers, various queer
groups, and the United Farm Workers of America. (She would later go on to
serve as assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative
Services in the Clinton administration.)
Similarly, Cone had participated in other social justice work for identities well
outside her own. While a student at the University of Illinois, she became
involved with the NAACP and participated in the civil rights movement in the
1960s. Learning from these other movements, and drawing from their resilience
and legacy, had intentional correlations when the sit-in was underway. Cone
recalls:
At every moment, we felt ourselves the descendants of the civil rights
movement of the ’60s. We learned about sit ins from the civil rights
movement, we sang freedom songs to keep up morale, and consciously
show the connection between the two movements. We always drew the
parallels. About public transportation we said we can’t even get on the
back of the bus.42
And these other groups recognized the correlations too—demonstrating
resistance to the more powerful body for the sake of civil rights. They showed
their recognition and support with the following: the Salvation Army, which
responds to everything from natural disasters to poverty, donated blankets and
cots; and the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, which routinely
provided meals for the poor, and the Delancey Street Foundation, which helped
addicts and post-incarcerated Americans with job training, donated food.43 Key
to these efforts was also the Oakland Black Panthers, who prepared and ferried
food across the bay every single day of the sit-in.
Offering food to the protestors was an essential and strategic tactic. Corbett
Joan O’Toole, a disability rights activist, recalled in an interview with Atlas
Obscura in 2017, “They [the Black Panther Party] understood what it meant to
support a revolutionary movement that wasn’t just on the street with weapons.”
O’Toole, who was present for the 504 Sit-In, alludes to the Black Panther’s
radical program to offer free breakfast to children as a way to combat
institutionalized poverty.44
At the end of April, after mounting pressure from the protests, HEW
Secretary Califano signed the regulations for section 504—unchanged. To date,
the 504 Sit-In is the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in the
United States. The win was not only an immediate civil rights win for disabled
communities, but also sent a formidable message about people who are on the
end of paternalism. Heumann recalled that the demonstrators “turned ourselves
from being oppressed individuals into being empowered people. We
demonstrated to the entire nation that disabled people could take control over
our own lives and take leadership in the struggle for equality.”45
They rallied around this piece of legislation, which would impact the future
and access for all disabled people in America and was also foundational to future
rulings, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990—offering way more
anti-discrimination barriers. Later, Cone pointed out that after section 504 was
signed, it “wasn’t strongly enforced.”46 But this building block to increased
rights was essential in legally establishing that discrimination can manifest in not
just exclusionary policies, but also inaccessibility. And that, regardless of what
diagnosis disabled people have, they have the capacity to experience
discrimination as a class—as a collective body.
Cone later reflected that “we understood that our isolation and segregation
stemmed from societal policy, not from some personal defects on our part and
our experiences with segregation and discrimination were not just our own
personal problems.”47

Chapter Five
Labor Laws Aim to Help All Genders

IT WAS THE NEW York Women’s Trade Union League (NYWTUL) that
eventually secured New York State Social Security as well as workers’
compensation for domestic workers1, an effort that has continued. In 2010,
New York became the first state in all of the United States to recognize domestic
workers with basic labor protections after six years of organizing by domestic
workers and unions. The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, legislation that
ensures workers are entitled to overtime pay, days off, protection from
discrimination and harassment, and protection under disability laws, has since
been enacted in Hawaii in 2013 and California in 2014, Oregon,2 Connecticut,3
and Massachusetts in 2015,4 and Illinois in 2017.5
Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, started
pushing for domestic worker rights locally in New York as a labor activist in 2001.

Before the founding of the alliance, she and a number of other activists
were trying to establish basic protections and standards for domestic workers.
That same year, they went to the city council to legally pass some protections
that included informing workers of their rights and employers of their legal
obligations to their employees.
“We found kind of a hook in the city laws,” Poo told me. “We were successful
in getting that law passed in a year through a lot of grassroots advocacy that
domestic workers did, including lobbying and marching, and calls to legislators
and coalition-building. And then when the laws passed, we realized just how
limited the laws were. So even if we were to notify every employer and every
worker about their rights and legal obligation, that there were so many limits to
what those rights were, that it was almost like it wouldn’t really have much
impact, so we realized we would have to go and change the labor laws.”
Poo and her fellow local organizers started asking the domestic workers they
were lobbying with what kinds of changes they would like to see enshrined into
New York State law. In 2003, this effort was eventually organized into the
Having Your Say Convention, where around 250 domestic workers from all over
New York City and upstate got together in small groups and shared professional
experiences.
“[They] talked about what it would look like to have respect and recognition
on the job and from a whole long list of maybe forty-some ideas that came about
of that convention we took them to law students at NYU—the Immigrant
Rights Law Clinic—who helped us translate all of those provisions into real
legal language,” says Poo.
With that legal language in hand, Poo, a couple of other organizers, some law
students, and a group of domestic workers went to Albany in January 2004 to
introduce these protections as a bill. “The bill went through lots of changes,”
Poo remembers as she and her fellow activists embarked on a six-year campaign
to pass legislation that was eventually signed by the state governor in 2010.
Three years into advocating for the New York State bill, the National Domestic
Workers Alliance was formed after connecting with workers in California,
Oregon, and Maryland. “We just started connecting across our different
localities to really learn from each other, to support each other. We decided to
hold our very first national meeting of domestic worker groups in June of 2007.
It was at that very first meeting where we talked about the New York Bill of
Rights and shared our lessons, and the California group shared their lessons.
And it was at that meeting where we said we really need a national organization.”
Harnessing these other local initiatives into a bigger effort, though, didn’t
usurp resources or local goals. In fact, Poo specifies that the founding of the
National Domestic Workers Alliance actually worked the other way around: “A
big part of the work of the alliance in coming together was figuring out how we
add oxygen and support to all of the local organizing, especially the New York
campaign that had really come a long way—it had a lot of momentum, it was
building power,” she says.
One of the first efforts the alliance executed after officially becoming a
national organization was coordinating a meeting in New York for domestic
workers around the United States. Working with other localized domestic
worker organizations around the country, the intent of the meeting was to
support the New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. Simultaneously, Poo
recalls that domestic workers in Massachusetts were also starting to discuss a bill.
“Momentum was starting to grow and we all wanted to throw our weight
behind what was happening in New York and then also start to support and
encourage workers who were organizing all over the country,” Poo told me.
Key to these organizational efforts, Poo stresses again and again, was listening
to domestic workers about their realities and creating forums for them to share
these realities with each other. Evoking the consciousness-raising circles of
second-wave feminism, this pivotal tactic allowed for domestic workers to find
commonality in their professional lives and, therefore, a systemic
comprehension of their experiences and working conditions. Understanding
their roles not just as individualized encounters, particularly working within the
shielded domain of private homes, facilitated conversations and strategic
initiatives about what protections they ultimately wanted from the system that
employed them.
This was specifically accomplished through hearing domestic workers rather
than dictating to them what their reality should look like or what their rights
should be, even by the activists who accompanied them on their path to work
protections.

Chapter Six
The Emergence of Self

IN THE 1970S, WHITE feminism emerged with new faces and a new mantra: self-
liberation. This strategy was not entirely misguided. Asserting your own
humanity, your own value, and daring to dream another life for yourself outside
of acceptability is the type of self-empowerment that can lead to great change, as
second-wave feminism revealed.
In 1973, author and poet Erica Jong published her now-classic
autobiographical novel Fear of Flying, detailing her heroine’s abandonment of
her stifling marriage and pursuit of sexual exploration. Much later, author
Naomi Wolf remembered the final scene in the book as “very liberating; it’s a
symbol of self-ownership and self-knowledge. I actually quote the scene in my
book: It shows that if you don’t own your body, you don’t own your mind.”1
Around that same time, Australian feminist Germaine Greer published her
international bestseller, The Female Eunuch, advocating that the suppression of
female sexuality compromised women’s ability to be self-fulfilled and
autonomous.2 These seminal texts reflected a brewing sentiment about how
much women had been denied by being tethered to the home. In a scathing
critique of the mainstream “women’s movement” in the New York Times,
author Joan Didion quotes a woman who says “the birth of children too often
means the dissolution of romance, the loss of freedom, and the abandonment of
ideals to economics.”3
A new magazine called Ms., cofounded by Gloria Steinem, began to appear
on newsstands after a growing generation of women responded overwhelmingly
to its stories on sexual harassment, abortion, politics, and domestic violence. The
one-time insert for New York magazine generated over twenty thousand reader
letters within a matter of weeks, and importantly, this was in a climate in which
the most popular women’s magazines operated as a cornucopia of stories of how
to find husbands, how to wear makeup, and how to raise children.4 But women
weren’t necessarily thinking of the babies they wanted to have or the husbands
they wanted to land. For the first time in American culture, they were thinking
about themselves.
The first issue of Ms. magazine, a year before Roe v. Wade was passed,
featured the names of fifty prominent women who stated they had had an
abortion.5 A list of this nature would have been engineered to shame a woman
not even five years before, but the editors at Ms. were trying to make a very
public statement about a “woman ha[ving] a right to sovereignty over her own
body.”6 The feature, headlined simply and boldly “We Have Had Abortions,”
was signed by well-known women like Susan Sontag, Billie Jean King, Grace
Paley, and Steinem herself, urging legalization of the procedure that had already
proved to be so critical, but potentially fatal, to so many women’s lives. Letty
Cottin Pogrebin, author and a founding editor at Ms. who also signed the
statement, later alluded that she and her fellow editors were trying to publicly
normalize what was already normal to many. “I thought it was especially
important because as a wife and mother of three, I could not easily be accused of
being a ‘baby killer.’ Almost all my friends had had abortions. I wanted everyone
to admit it.”7
And that included readers. The declaration included a cut-out statement to
sign and mail, confirming that you too had had an abortion and that you were
joining the Ms. petition to repeal laws against reproductive freedom.8 Ms. was
trying to harness a movement into a magazine. And that movement was well
underway.
Whether women were reading about Jong’s heroine searching for the “zipless
fuck” or signing reproductive freedom petitions, feminism was now embracing
the cultural freedom to simply exist and redefining that existence well outside
the roles women had been hyperconditioned to inhabit.
Once you stripped “heterosexual wife and mother” from that identity,
multiple cultural exercises in the 1970s attempted to explore what that existence
could be. The film Diary of a Mad Housewife (named after the 1967 book)
explored becoming a sexual being when your marriage was a bust. Sylvia Plath’s
arrestingly modern The Bell Jar, which was published in the United States in
1971—and on the New York Times bestseller list9—explored becoming a female
artist. And The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich’s second poetry
collection after she came out as a lesbian in 1976, explored relationships that
were outside sanctioned heterosexuality.10
All in all, the second-wave consensus was that the self was important for
women to maintain and cultivate.
A decade later, in 1988, poet Audre Lorde published her essay collection A
Burst of Light, in which she wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is
self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”11 She would know.
Lorde had spent the whole of the 1970s publishing poetry and teaching,12
navigating the world of all-white male academia as a first-generation American
Black lesbian. She was used to asserting a selfhood that was routinely disregarded
by colleagues, institutions, power holders, and commercialism. Upon learning of
her cancer diagnosis in the 1980s, she wrote that she would try to make her
death meaningful, observing, “I wasn’t supposed to exist anyway, not in any
meaningful way in this fucked-up whiteboys’ world.”13
This assertion of self runs the spectrum from legislative efforts to eroticism,
where we still revisit the constant taboo of, say, a devoted mother who also wants
to have a lot of sex or a poverty-stricken person who is also an artistic genius.
The endurance of these themes in film, in books, in media, in pop culture
evidence how difficult it is to assign personhood, a space that is just for them and
no one else. They predominately exist in relationship to other people, be it their
children, families, employers, partners, or community needs.
Claiming self has also been essential in creating and sustaining artistry outside
the dominant lens. It’s the “selfish” women through history who have afforded
us a canon of work that speaks to experiences outside being white and cis male.
Author Doris Lessing famously left two of her children and husband14 to devote
herself fully to writing and political work.15 Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay turned
down several marriage proposals, instead eventually going with an offer from
attorney Eugen Jan Boissevain, who vowed to not only never demand any
domestic work from her but also promised to devote himself fully to her literary
genius—a promise he made good on.16 And yet the cultural tendency to vilify
these women says a lot more about what we intrinsically expect from them
rather than the dehumanizing parameters we have constructed around their
lives.
For many, becoming individually focused has also proved essential in
assessing and confronting systems that are fundamentally not made for you; you
have to become preoccupied with your own well-being when you realize that
much of what is in place to protect and serve others is nonexistent for you.
White feminism was and still is very successful in this endeavor: encouraging
women to become more self-interested and asserting an existence outside of
being a constant resource to others.
But the white feminist interpretation of this credo, which would endure in
the third- and fourth-wave, collapsed self-empowerment and individualism.
Pushing for your own humanity is not the same as becoming a self-realized
CEO, but for white feminists, it would be. Becoming self-empowered does not
necessarily mean only becoming preoccupied with yourself. For other gendered
movements, realizing what you need can be the threshold to identifying and
understanding what other people need, too.
What makes the Ms. abortion statement so powerful was that it bridged the
individual with the collective by making the declaration a collective challenge:
We have all had abortions and we want legislative change for all. We have all had
to make these taboo, shameful, potentially fatal decisions and it shouldn’t be that
way for everyone.
History has echoed this interpretation too. I think of all the archival images
I’ve seen of women at desks in the signature dress of the time—a collage of
loafers or bobby socks or miniskirts with sweaters whose colors are muted by
black-and-white. Afros with big hoop earrings and dainty lockets over twinsets
beside a typewriter that they commandeer with one hand. Barrettes that match a
broach and crossed legs with a notepad in their lap and a single pencil for
dictation. A big, hefty computer from the 1980s and a female engineer with a
clipboard and a protocol to follow. Rosie the Riveter. Women with 1940s
silhouettes and power tools. I’ve come across these photographs when
researching potential stories or gender rights and I have loved them so very much
for what they represent: disruption. This was the year this university started
admitting female students. This was the moment women were recruited for the
war effort. This was the first woman ever hired to work for this company. This
was when women were hired beyond the secretarial pool.
We have illustrated this incredible history with their faces—and also the
environments they crossed into: law firms, newspaper offices, assembly lines,
government bodies, factory floors, business empires, and commercial
enterprises. What this has also subtly messaged to me, and many others, is that
it’s the professional sphere that is the primary battleground for insurgence. That
it will be in the glass conference rooms and in the open office spaces and at the
metaphorical desk that our gender milestones will be won.
But challenges to power don’t just happen there. In 1933, Marlene Dietrich
was unapologetically self-centered when she deliberately chose to disembark
from a steam liner in solidly masculine attire. The bisexual, androgynous
German actress had been photographed on the SS Europa wearing a white men’s
suit making her way from the United States to France—both countries where
dressing in opposite-sex attire warranted jail time and would continue to do so
into the twentieth century. Dietrich was no exception; a police chief in Paris who
got wind of Dietrich’s photograph via the French press let it be known that if
she stepped off the ship in masculine attire, she would be arrested on sight.
Many of these laws, which in the United States originated in the 1850s or so,
would reach new heights and increased arrests as gender policing became more
urgent. As William N. Eskridge Jr. writes in his book Gaylaw, “by the beginning
of the 20th century, gender inappropriateness… was increasingly considered a
sickness and public offense.”17
Dietrich, who was still aboard the SS Europa when she was notified of the
Paris chief’s threat, made the decision to not only deliberately defy the warning,
but to commit even further to the offense: she reviewed her wardrobe and
selected her most “mannish” suit for her arrival, famously a tweed pantsuit with
a long coat, a tie, a beret, and tiny circular sunglasses18—an intentional and
subtle signaling of lesbianism.19
When the ship docked by way of the English Channel, Dietrich took a train
into Paris where the police chief was waiting for her (as well as a bevy of press
eager to capture Dietrich arriving from across the pond). According to accounts,
Dietrich spotted the police chief and walked straight up to him, took his arm,
and walked with him off the platform.20 A photograph21 of the encounter
endures, with Dietrich seemingly to stride confidently with one hand in her
pocket ahead of a strong line of suited men, all in hats.
No arrest was made. The police chief reportedly apologized to Dietrich and
sent her a bracelet.22 (Note that the gift was a bracelet and not, say, cuff links.)

Chapter Seven
The Perennial Shifting Around of Domestic Work

THE PRIMARY REASON WOMEN’S realization of self comes at the expense of
domestic labor is that we’ve never properly accounted for it. Even as women’s
rights have secured key wins, feminist economics, a growing field since the
1980s, has established how deeply gendered our understanding of labor is.
Feminist scholars and thinkers have sought to correct this massive oversight by
exploring the many ways traditional women’s labor has not been deemed part of
the economical equation—or “natural.”
Housework, childrearing, and food preparation is unseen in traditional
economic theory, explains Katrine Marçal in Who Cooked Adam Smith’s
Dinner? In revisiting the formative beliefs of “the Father of Economics,” as he is
often referred to, Adam Smith, Marçal asserts that traditional women’s labor
was not economized—and therefore not considered a valuable endeavor (either
financially or socially).
She observes:
Adam Smith wanted to conserve love in a jar. On the label, economists
wrote ‘women.’ The contents weren’t allowed to be mixed with anything
else and had to be kept locked away. This ‘other economy’ was seen as
something entirely separate. Without importance for the whole, and
actually it wasn’t an economy at all, but an inexhaustible natural resource.
Later, the Chicago economists concluded that this other economy
wasn’t just irrelevant to explaining how prosperity was created, it simply
didn’t exist. It was just as good to run our families and our marriages using
the rules of the market.
Nothing else existed.
If we really wanted to conserve love and care in society, instead of
excluding it we should have tried to support it with money and resources.
We should have organized the economy around what was important for
people. But we did the opposite.
We redefined people to fit our idea of the economy.1
One persisting consequence of this sexist bedrock is that domestic labor is often
deemed worthless, of little importance, or not as important as the work that
yields money. But just because what women have performed—and still do—
doesn’t yield profits doesn’t make it valueless. And conflating money with
validity, as feminist economists and critics of capitalism have examined, is failed
logic.
“Having learned from the movement to think radically about the personal
worth and abilities of people whose role in society had gone unchallenged
before, a lot of women in the movement have begun trying to apply those
lessons to their own relations with men,” wrote Casey Hayden and Mary King,
two activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
who addressed this sexism in the civil rights movement in 1965.2 Their widely
circulated document, “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo,” detailed the many
ways that women were relegated to certain tasks and roles because of a “sexual
caste system.” Worse still, when they attempted to broach this treatment with
men in the movement, the response was basically that they were dumb or crazy
or frivolous (inventive!):
… few men can respond non-defensively, since the whole idea is either
beyond their comprehension or threatens and exposes them. The usual
response is laughter. That inability to see the whole issue as serious, as the
straitjacketing of both sexes, and as societally determined often shapes our
own response so that we learn to think in their terms about ourselves and
to feel silly rather than trust our inner feelings.3
Ultimately, the mandate was to support the persecuted men of color within their
respective communities at all costs given the overarching threat of white
supremacy. That advocating on behalf of men meant assuming all domestic
labor and childrearing subserviently and invisibly was telling, though, and some
women of color activists found this to be a suspicious and pernicious narrative
with much deeper roots. In her book Separate Roads to Feminism: Black,
Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave, Professor
Benita Roth observes that gender discrimination, harassment, and abuse were
getting lost, and, at times, directly refuted in 1960s civil rights discourse. Roth
writes, “The [Third World Women’s Alliance, a socialist organization founded
by and for women of color in 1968] TWWA was adamant in their insistence that
Black militant men were being ‘white’ and middle-class when they enforced
middle-class gender roles and expected Black women to be ‘breeders’ for the
revolution.”4 One of the founders, Frances Beal, addressed this connection more
directly in an early pamphlet for TWWA titled “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black
and Female” that was later revised for multiple anthologies. She argued that the
whole concept of two genders that performed in distinctly different ways was
shaped by a need to sell them gender-specific products. Black women were not a
part of this vision of affluent womanhood, because the aspiration was designed
with middle-class comforts, whiteness, and disposable income in mind. Black
women worked outside the home in addition to executing all the domestic labor,
so they did not fit the vision of the moneyed housewife contemplating her
skincare regime while her children were tended to in the next room. Beal argued
that there was little point “for the Black community to support a system that
was not designed for them, for male Black liberation activists to take their
guidelines for gender analysis ‘from the pages of the Ladies Home Journal.’”5
But where economics has coded women’s labor as “natural,” capitalism has
framed it as “choice.” The evolving neoliberal landscape in which feminist-
identified women begin their gender consciousness with autonomy, agency, and
self-empowerment means that there are no economic or financial barriers: there
are only decisions to be made on your own highly individualized timeline.
I see all this collide most explosively in the public arena of women and
nonbinary people weighing whether to have children or not.
The cornerstone personal essay I’ve edited within my career has been the
evergreen meditation on “Should I or should I not have children?” The author is
usually college-educated, married to a man, and somewhere between her late
twenties and early thirties. Her relationship is usually quite stable and for the
first time in her life, she isn’t waking up panicked about how to pay off her
student loan debt and her electric bill. She sees other women with children and
begins to wonder. She holds her birth control in her hands late at night and
begins to consider skipping a pill—or a patch, or a condom, or a ring, or
whatever birth control that has facilitated her ability to make this decision in the
first place.
I’ve commissioned these essays and I’ve also published alongside them at
virtually every women’s outlet I’ve ever worked for. What makes these narratives
eternal is that they perform well despite the news cycle, despite what celebrity
just eloped, despite whatever Trump just said. Because if traffic is slumping mid-
month, you can publish one of them on a Monday afternoon and readers will
heartily share a particularly heartfelt pull quote with the single mandate
“THIS.” But the guaranteed perennial popularity of this essay illuminates
clearly the dead end women of certain socioeconomic backgrounds have found
themselves in.
With the absence of subsidized childcare, paid federal parental leave, and
rampant pregnancy discrimination, young women who have had a healthy
amount of class advantages are left to ask themselves if they want to effectively
lose them—because that’s what parenthood in the United States will ultimately
entail: If they want to partake in a different kind of labor that will offer them
fewer legal protections, limited pay, increased hours, increased personal financial
burdens, and with zero support from the institutions to which they have
dedicated expanding days and increased workloads.
In this increasing neoliberal cultural terrain, where everyone is encouraged to
optimize themselves for the best employment, the strongest partnerships, the
most successful path, what strategically middle-class, somewhat self-aware
woman wants to do more work for less money? If it wasn’t parenthood we were
talking about but a white-collar job, Sheryl Sandberg would tell these young
women to lean out.
The pragmatics of having a baby are fundamentally incompatible with the
dominant cultural messages surrounding economic security, class ascension, and
performance aimed at women of these particular socioeconomic backgrounds.
This is the tension that underlies many of these waffling motherhood essays and,
I think, what young, professional, child-curious people are looking to reconcile
when they click on these “Should I, a Middle-Class Woman Who Went to NYU,
Have a Baby and Fuck Up This Good Thing?” headlines. But what often awaits
them is a contemplation of “choice” and very seldom an expanded structural
critique. They are placated into the numbing mantra that having children is “a
personal choice,” encouraging increased individual reflection on what is actually
a raging systemic failure that relies on women’s free labor. But structuring the
conversation of having children around personal autonomy and lone
circumstances also successfully eclipses the identification of parenthood as labor
in the first place.
If motherhood is a “choice,” then you don’t necessarily frame it as work. If
what you’re doing isn’t positioned as work, then you don’t think you have
workers’ rights. You don’t assemble for those rights. You don’t organize around
those rights. You don’t disrupt for the sake of those rights. Because what you’ve
committed to doing is a “choice,” evoking personal resources and circumstances,
rendering structures either invisible or irrelevant.
As some women have garnered increased access to earning power, education,
and financial autonomy, “choice” has become a successful narrative to
overshadow the glaring reality that the United States is the only industrialized
nation in the world without federal paid parental or maternity leave. Between
the lost wages from parental leave, high childcare costs, and the overall financial
penalty of returning to work as a mother, it’s no wonder at all that the American
birth rate continues to decline.6 And that the women who do have enough class
insulation to even make that choice are choosing to have children later or simply
not at all.
Of course, not all decisions are intellectual ones. But the conscious decision
to go hurtling into financial insecurity after living, ascending, or arriving in
middle-class comforts is a labyrinth I’ve received rivers of pitches on throughout
my career. For some of these privileged women, the class demotion that having
children would inflict on their lives is so counter-enterprising that they can’t
even apply intentionality to it, so they consider toying with chance in its many
distilled forms: What would happen if they skipped one pill? What if they and
their cis male partner decided to not not try? What if they just didn’t use
condoms once or twice? Having biological children then occupies a space of
circumstance or a place they just found themselves rather than making that
concerted choice to compromise their class status.
Regardless of what you can or cannot economically sustain, the biological
urge for a child (as some people experience it) can override the nuts and bolts of
resources. But the strain here, much like Marçal explained, is that we didn’t erect
our economy around biology or bodies, especially cisfemale ones. She observes:
These economic theories place us outside our bodies…. Our economic
theories refuse to accept the reality of the body and flee as far from it as
they can. That people are born small and die fragile, and that skin cut with
a sharp object will bleed no matter who you are, no matter where you
come from, no matter what you earn and no matter where you live. What
we have in common starts with the body. We shiver when we are cold,
sweat when we run, cry out when we come and cry out when we give
birth. It’s through the body that we can reach other people. So, economic
man eradicates it. Pretends it doesn’t exist. We observe it from the outside
as if it were foreign capital.
And we are alone.7
The deep loneliness that can stem from caregiving in the United States, whether
it’s for very young children or aging parents, has always been a low-current hum
in women’s history, echoing behind literature, statistics, mental health
evolutions, and hand-wringing press narratives about social media.8 Among
abusive marriages and gendered cultural expectations, it’s what I remember
tracing most in my undergraduate English classes: women’s unique isolation
within their own families, often perpetuated by the work and care that no one
sees, respects, or values. I’ve traced it through the length of my career, watching
the exploitation of women’s labor develop into a stereotype that weaves in and
out of television shows, films, and contemporary novels, a running joke where it
suits the tonality or where the story isn’t necessarily told from her point of view.
Our culture doesn’t value the people and bodies on the other side of that care
work either. More pointedly, older women: one of the most invisible
populations in the United States. And white feminism, with its enduring youth
and productivity obsession, has not strategically championed them or their
needs (unless they are an older woman who is considered productive: see Nancy
Pelosi, Gayle King, Glenn Close, and Katie Couric, among others.9)
In “A Feminist Analysis of the Abuse and Neglect of Elderly Women,”
feminist theorist Dr. Rosemarie Tong and Howard Lintz, an attorney, observe in
2019 that elder abuse is more common in women than men. They attribute this
under-examined reality to sexism within analyses of the aging (male experiences
are prioritized), but also due to what “feminism” has prioritized. The authors
write:
In general, feminist healthcare literature is preoccupied with the
reproductive concerns of younger women, such as unwanted pregnancies
or unwanted infertility, to the near exclusion of the healthcare issues of
elderly women, such as joint replacements, debilitating arthritis,
deteriorating senses, and memory loss. The result is an analysis largely
lacking in its ability to further the interests of elderly women. The
concerns and interests of women over age 65 are perceived or treated as
less significant than those of younger women.10
I’ve witnessed this type of ageism in practice within “feminist” spaces. From the
women I’ve sat with on gender panels who trivialize the concerns and struggles
of older women to a white feminist I worked with who routinely referred to our
baby boomer readers as “the olds.” The message I have consistently gotten as a
“young feminist,” from other “feminists” in “feminist discussions” is that older
women don’t matter. And when we are designing or entertaining a “feminist”
future, women over the age of sixty-five simply don’t exist.
What this has often solidified to me, is that whether women need care or are
providing care, both white feminism and patriarchy aren’t furnishing the
vocabulary, metrics, or impetus to understand this domain.
Across the spectrum of age, the often white “depressed housewife” trope has
become a cultural shorthand for a lot of realities that we choose not to assign
complexity to: lack of financial autonomy, financial abuse, abusive partnerships,
postpartum depression, and prolonged stress and exhaustion among them. But
overarching through all of them is the coursing assumption that their household
labor is somehow not productive. And it’s easier and more convenient to just
collapse all of those systemic influences under the image of a sad, white woman
with rollers in her hair than actually consider the larger infrastructure that
facilitates it.
On the flip side of the middle-class housewife stereotype is the hyper-stressed
“working woman,” a phrase I cannot even say in conversation without assigning
quotes to it because all women work—it’s just that some of them work outside
the home. This cartoon character of a woman, also white and white-collar, seems
to have evolving suit silhouettes, but not much else about her changes. She may
have hired domestic workers but she is still late to meetings, harried about
getting the kids to school on time, spilling coffee on her power suit before an
important appointment, and seems to have a husband who offers to take their
daughter to ballet practice every once in a while. She may miss important
milestones like first haircuts and soccer games but she makes lunches and reads
the children bedtime stories and does their homework with them and does a
load of laundry in between (or some variation)—at which point her husband
complains about their lack of a sex life. This two-dimensional character alludes
to the same lack of support for women’s labor, but it’s uniquely through her and
her middle- or upper-class narrative that feminism is often subtly or directly
blamed for her plight. Sometimes it’s through an extended monologue with
other mothers or sometimes it’s a dig from a colleague or a boss about, But
aren’t you for women’s rights? Didn’t you burn your bra?11 Weren’t you a lesbian
once?
The general assessment is that working outside of the home, earning an
impressive salary, managing other people—this is what gender progress looks
like. And complaining about missing moments with your children is counter to
feminist wins. So shut up and do your second shift and be grateful that you even
get the opportunity to be falling asleep at PTA meetings because you stayed up
late washing dishes just to convey to your children that you love them.
So the white lady in the power suit goes inward, with what would be aptly
identified as depression if it wasn’t a romantic comedy or dramedy, and
feminism gets subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) nudged for putting our
protagonist in this position in the first place. But this is where economics, and
understanding what has been left out of these societal formulas, is essential to
reconstituting gender oppression. Why are we holding feminism responsible for
the deeply rooted sexism of economics?
Marçal details how misguided this cultural indictment often is:
Maybe it’s not feminism that’s making women stressed. Maybe it’s the
way we run our economy. Maybe the changes achieved by the women’s
movement in the last forty years have not caused these problems. Maybe
they have simply highlighted an inherent contradiction in society between
care work and competition. There is contradiction between the things we
do for ourselves and the things we need to do for others. And a
contradiction like that is essentially an economic problem.12
It’s this very contradiction that has made domestic workers essential to white
feminists’ self-interested, and often capitalistic, ascension to gender equality—
either within their homes, their workplaces, or within their own families. But
outsourcing the work that has traditionally moored white women to the home
hasn’t necessarily resulted in increased reverence, pay, or respect for the people
who perform it. Historically, they’ve been reticent to concede that their ability to
participate in other facets of public life depends on these very same women.
Activist and author Angela Davis notes in her classic book Women, Race &
Class:
White women—feminists included—have revealed a historical reluctance
to acknowledge the struggles of household workers. They have rarely been
involved in the Sisyphean task of ameliorating the conditions of domestic
service. The convenient omission of household workers’ problems from
the programs of “middle-class” feminists past and present has often
turned out to be a veiled justification—at least on the part of the affluent
women—of their own exploitative treatment of their maids.13
This exploitative treatment is ongoing. In 2012, the first national survey of
domestic workers was released by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the
University of Illinois at Chicago, and the DataCenter, concluding that 95
percent of housecleaners, nannies, and caregivers are female.14 Of the just over
two thousand domestic workers interviewed, researchers found that 23 percent
of all domestic workers and 67 percent of live-in workers were paid below the
minimum wage.
Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, reported for
Time that because so many of these workers do not have formalized contracts
with their employers, their hours can lengthen without additional pay.15 Because
so many are immigrants and often work alone within these homes, they don’t
have the resources or environments to compare wages.
According to Poo, the inequities just continue on from there: late pay, food
insecurity because of late pay, and the “physical hazards” of working with harsh
chemicals. Forty percent of workers said they have had to pay rent or other
“essential bills” late while 20 percent went without food. And on top of those
hardships, only 4 percent of those surveyed receive health insurance from their
employers; less than nine percent into Social Security.16
Financial abuses aside, “many” domestic workers surveyed said that they
endured verbal, physical, or psychological abuse by their employer without
“recourse.” And much like the power dynamics often cited in unreported sexual
harassment by women in both the blue-collar and white-collar workforce, these
workers feared retaliation by their employer.
Ninety-one percent of the domestic workers who confronted problems with
their working conditions in the last year did not complain because they were
afraid it would cost them their income. Similarly, 85 percent of undocumented
immigrants did not “complain” because they feared their immigration status
would be used against them.
These are the women who make “leaning in” possible and these are their
demographics: over half of the workers surveyed identify as Hispanic or Latina,
Black or African American, Asian or Pacific Islander, or “some other race” that’s
not white.
The 2019 version of this report, “Human Trafficking at Home: Labor
Trafficking of Domestic Workers,”17 which details more or less the same
landscape, darkly observes:
For domestic workers, sociological and historical factors also play a role.
Domestic work was an integral part of chattel slavery in the United States.
People in slavery cleaned, cooked, cared for children and otherwise
provided the scaffolding for life as it was known in the American south
during slavery. Following the abolition of chattel slavery, empowering
domestic workers was deemed likely to change the racial dynamics of that
era and not pursued. Over a century later, the legacy of slavery is still
playing out in ways both tangible and less so. The exclusion of domestic
workers from protections under certain U.S. labor laws is an example of a
tangible hangover from the slavery and Jim Crow eras as those laws were
purposefully crafted to block former slaves from amassing power to hold
employers accountable.18
And yet, white feminism’s messaging around getting ahead and breaking glass
ceilings is to engage in and take advantage of this exact dynamic—all the while
branding that it’s “feminist” to do so.
What was traditionally deemed “women’s work” in the 1950s and well before
—caring for children, keeping the home, preparing the meals; the household
labor that grew and supported the careers of men—has shifted to brown and
Black women’s work (and often was beforehand, honestly), thereby freeing up
women with upward economic mobility to become the 1950s men in the post-
millennial age.
But what’s feminist about oppressing other women within the shadow of
slavery so that you can have a corner office and be profiled in The Cut?
White feminism’s reliance on outsourcing labor has proved a complex dynamic
that, in real time, has always been difficult, namely for white women, to
reconcile. Echoing Davis’s observation about how closely white female
advancement is linked to the exploitation of domestic workers is a hardened
knot that even unions have struggled to undo.
In 1939, after years of unsuccessfully unionizing domestic workers, the New
York Women’s Trade Union League finally conducted a city-wide conference on
“slave markets,” as they were known. These “markets” consisted of desperate
Black female domestic workers gathering on New York City street corners where
white housewives promised work to the lowest bidder.19 For unions, what made
this dynamic even more fraught is that many of the Jewish wives who came to
find and secure cheap labor were married to trade unionists—the very people
who organized on behalf of the rights of the disenfranchised.20 Clearly, this
foundational understanding of what kind of labor was being exploited did not
extend to the home, or the women who were drafted to sustain it.
Much like the findings from NDWA in 2012, unions from this era found it
challenging to legislate protections and organize for workers who went into
private homes every day. They shifted their strategy to the Department of Labor,
where one of their own, Frieda Miller, had secured an influential position as
New York’s industrial commissioner. She organized a committee specifically to
break up “slave markets,” but also to create more immediate solutions for the
women who depended on those low wages. Said committee put together ad hoc
state employment bureaus on the very street corners where many of these
domestic workers gathered. Orleck writes in Common Sense and a Little Fire,
“The bureaus worked beautifully. The first two, opened in the Bronx, reported
more than six hundred successful employee-employer negotiations per day, for a
total of nineteen thousand during their ten months of operation.”21 But after
the start of World War II, there were increased employment opportunities for
Black women specifically in manufacturing and defense-related roles, and so
“slave markets” ended up disappearing somewhat organically.

Chapter Eight
Leaning In vs. Leaning On

THE DARK SIDE OF women seeking out an individualized understanding of
themselves à la Erica Jong is that the work of the home doesn’t just disappear. If
you want to find a passion-based vocation or a hobby or an education or explore
your sexuality, floors still need to be cleaned and meals still need to be cooked. If
men are not taking on these responsibilities or women are unpartnered,
someone else has to come in to pick up the slack. And where labor has been
cheap under capitalism, women and other marginalized genders have been
historically implicated to carry it out.
As the industrial feminists disagreed with middle- to upper-class feminists on
what gender equality effectively looked like, labor emerged as a differing and
lasting issue between them. For the women of means, they viewed the men in
their lives—their husbands, brothers, and sons—as the template for their own
equality. What this meant in practice is that when it came to envisioning
political order under women’s suffrage, the middle- and upper-class activists
were also looking to dictate how working-class women in factories and laundries
voted and what the core issues were. Worse still, the more affluent women
wanted to make these decisions alongside the men of socialist and labor
movements—men who didn’t politically prioritize working-class labor from
women.
For industrial feminists, this thread across the powerful—a control of their
labor—incentivized them to solidify their political platform on labor: the
women who do it, the conditions they do it in, and how they were
compensated.1 The critical divide also established a guiding principle: free or
cheap labor was often female, and therefore neglected by patriarchs and policy.
Industrial feminists were able to assert the value of their labor by both
striking from their employers when demands for fair working conditions were
ignored and encouraging unionization to protect their goals. This two-pronged
strategy was upsetting to business as usual—and it was supposed to be.
In November 1909, two years before the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist fire,
fifteen thousand garment workers, primarily Jewish and immigrant women,
walked out and didn’t come back for three months. Their mass organization
against exploitation and abuse would increase from there.
Thousands more women eventually joined them. The strike was led by Clara
Lemlich, a union organizer of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’
Union (ILGWU), and supported by the growing NYWTUL. Known as the
Uprising of the 20,000, it was the largest strike of American women workers
anyone had ever seen up until then.
The workers came back to the factories in February 1910 after their
employers finally caved on what they had wanted in the first place: shorter hours,
better pay, and safer working conditions. Not only was the strike a success, but it
motivated the women’s labor movement to think bigger. They wanted legislative
reform. A prominent goal of some of the organizations was a state-wide
minimum wage.
Initially, many of these working-class women were recruited into the suffrage
movement by Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s
daughter,2 and no doubt influenced its triumph. However, the mother-daughter
duo had very different visions of women’s equality: while Stanton believed there
should be literary and educational requirements for the vote,3 Blatch believed
the inclusion of working-class women was essential to gender rights.4 Despite
the opinions of both Stantons, women who supported themselves, who were
immigrants, who worked in factories, would not stay with the suffrage crowd
long-term.
Through their increased visibility and continued demonstration over the next
twenty years, labor activists organized their first national convention. When First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt learned of this, she extended an invitation to a
stenographer, six New York garment workers, a waitress, and seven Alabama
textile workers to come to the White House for a week and discuss their
platform.5 What followed was a fruitful relationship between the Roosevelt
administration and working-class women, punctuated with labor bills. Many,
many state initiatives rose and fell as Rose Schneiderman, an immigrant feminist
labor activist from the NYWTUL, began working in the Labor Department. By
1938, female labor activists had secured Social Security for employees of both
small and big businesses and standards on wage, safety, and hours for all sexes.6
That isn’t to say that they got everything they lobbied for. But a new precedent
had been set in terms of an American president working with and for working-
class women, something Americans and specifically these activists had never
encountered before.
The moves in Congress and state bills also created a domino effect over other
industries that were not, on paper, protected by standing law. After years of
strike organizing, the NYWTUL was finally able to unionize laundry workers,
an endeavor that took about thirty years. By 1939, New York was home to a
union of twenty-seven thousand laundry workers with contracts securing paid
vacations, reduced hours, paid sick leave, and better wages.7 After Congress
enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act, the NYWTUL coerced owners of hotels
in New York to settle ongoing strikes with hotel staff, specifically the cleaning
crews. When the hotels eventually settled in 1938, activists had secured a six-day
workweek, increased wages, and shorter hours for the predominantly Puerto
Rican and Black hotel maids.8
These wins took decades of sustained organizing, meetings, lobbying, and
sometimes momentary concessions to secure. But a core conviction of industrial
feminist mobilization was that they were performing essential labor to the
growing garment industry of the twentieth century. And as the workers carrying
out this foundational labor, they would set the value to it—not their bosses. It
was a dramatic cultural shift in power, authority, and the execution of
exploitation. More core still was the belief that the work they were doing was
labor in the first place, a conceptual lens that scant pay can and does obscure.
This narrow recognition of labor is not necessarily limited to overtly
capitalistic enterprises like businesses. It’s a template that has even been exported
to the construction of social movements, tinged with patriarchy. In the 1960s, as
both Black Liberation and Chicano loyalists were respectively assembling for
civil rights, it was often women in their grassroots organizing who sustained the
economy of their activism.9 Typing letters, making phone calls, preparing food
for fellow organizers, buying stamps, arranging childcare so women could even
be there in the first place tended to fall along very gendered lines, with Black
women and Chicana organizers doing all the menial work. This toiling at desks,
in homes, around kitchen tables, in the margins of headquarters made the
public-facing activism of the often male speakers and radicals possible. Not only
were women often relegated to these more supporting roles, but there was often
little recognition or respect for these jobs, even among collectives that were
advocating revolutions. (This lack of recognition or consideration was
compounded with unaddressed sexual harassment and sexual objectification
within their respective movements.)
That women and women’s work was not even identified within some of the
most reformist campaigns of the time spurred Black feminists, Chicanas, and
white women of the New Left to ostensibly found and establish second-wave
feminism: women who supported ideological and structural shifts in power but
who didn’t see gender literacy being practiced in these allegedly revisionist
spaces. The women who came up in this time, who spoke publicly about gender
oppression and racism, collectively pushed for many of the legislative wins that
are now considered foundational to women’s rights in the United States: Roe v.
Wade, Title IX, the end of sex-segregated help-wanted ads, the ability to get a
credit card without being married, the legal acknowledgment that yes, marital
rape exists, and a pregnancy discrimination act (after the Supreme Court ruled
that pregnancy discrimination was not a form of sex discrimination under the
Civil Rights Act), among others.
These wins were eventual, though. Initially, in the 1960s, as women activists
were talking about getting grabbed in social justice meetings or being siloed into
certain tasks because of their gender, the response from these separate, male-led,
radical communities was unsupportive. Feminism was dismissed as insubstantial
enough to warrant any resources or as being a white, middle-class woman’s
concept that had infected their communities in the cases of Chicano and Black
movements. But there was a more immediate threat to these radical groups than
ideological differences about gender: women exiting their cause to found
another threatened the activist economy.
Who would type all the correspondence? Who would make the phone calls?
Who would feed everyone? That many of these activist groups had exploited the
labor of their female allies in the name of revolution was indicative of just how
deep-seated taking advantage of their work had always been to daily function.
But this exploitative understanding of work that women performed vastly
predated social justice efforts of the 1960s or even the turn-of-the-century
factory floor. By failing to put value, resources, or even critical assessment to the
labor that goes into making a home, we will always factor out the people who
perform it.
Marçal writes, “Women’s work is a natural resource that we don’t think we
need to account for. Because we assume it will always be there. It’s considered
invisible, indelible infrastructure.”10And because changing diapers, grocery
shopping, doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, and cooking dinner are all coded
as “a natural resource,” this labor doesn’t require maintenance, upkeep,
replenishing, or even materials as far as traditional economics is concerned. But
as anyone who has performed those tasks can tell you, caregiving does require
people. Sometimes lots of people or sometimes one person in particular. Entire
families or one parent or grandparents or older siblings or aunts and uncles or
for-hire nannies or daycares or part-time maids or an elaborate constellation of
neighbors and community. Under basic economics, though, this constellation
doesn’t exist—only fully formed people do, without any assessment of the
resources and time and labor that got them there.
This flawed understanding has been adopted into white feminism without
critique, and well into modern times. One salient criticism of Lean In, Sheryl
Sandberg’s “sort of feminist manifesto,”11 as she called it, was that her
resounding encouragement for women to lean in requires leaning on other
women. Author and professor Nancy Fraser pointed out in 2015 that in order to
effectively lean in, you need to lean on underpaid domestic care, usually from
lower-income women, most of whom are of color12—people who, as far as
insular feminist discourse goes, haven’t even been traditionally seen as women.
Because we don’t have federal subsidized care like nearly all other
industrialized countries, the basic care of children and family members is left to
whatever women and other marginalized genders can financially cobble together
—and it starts with maternity leave. If you’re pregnant and like most American
women, you piece together a maternity leave based on a messy quilt of paid time
off, assuming you even have any. If you happen to work for a company for more
than a year that has at least fifty employees, you’re entitled to up to twelve weeks
unpaid leave, essentially meaning that your employer is obligated to hold your
job but will legally expect you back before your newborn can even sit upright,
assuming that you gave birth. If you adopted or fostered a child, you are offered
the same deal. The same time frame would apply to you if a family member was
sick and needed you to organize their care. This is all that is protected under the
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which we got in 1993. Before that,
there was no legislation to protect a mother’s time with her newborn in the
United States.
Individual states and private companies have all sorts of maternity leave (paid
and unpaid), much of which has been pushed through the narrative of
productivity and cost—yet another white feminist metric. When Google
increased paid parental leave from twelve weeks to eighteen weeks, YouTube
CEO Susan Wojcicki, who has five children of her own, tweeted in 2016 that the
rate at which new mothers quit dropped 50 percent.13 When Quartz, a business
news brand, covered this news, it was obviously framed around what was
ultimately best for the company:
These changes do more than to make new mothers feel welcomed in the
workplace. Because turnover is costly for businesses—by one estimate it
costs 20% or more of an employee’s salary to replace him or her—
companies, too, benefit from keeping female employees and their
expertise.14
But this message was echoed in other outlets with a similar tenor. Coding a win
for parental leave around saving company money once again—just like Lean In
—lines up “feminism” as being loosely pro-woman but with corporate interests.
Women and other marginalized genders succeeding in these environments is an
extension of that narrative. This corporate-success-as-feminism equation falls
apart very cleanly with the way childcare breaks down.
Much like the parental leave most American women have to stitch together
with pieces of an archaic benefits system, childcare often runs about the same:
with women at private companies with “generous” parental leaves doing pretty
fine and then employing low-income women at low wages to care for their
children, clean their homes, and ferry their mother-in-law to doctors’
appointments.
This is where white feminism is at its most literal: the empowerment and
advancement stops at affluent white women or those women who mirror a white
success model, i.e., those poised for capitalistic success through college education
and middle- to upper-socioeconomic status.
That money, profits, and business were the undercurrent of this highly
individualized popular feminist discourse was further evidenced in the rallying
around personal autonomy and agency. As feminism was aligned with business
interests, a wealth of pop culture icons messaged that feminism was a way for
them to feel independent, in control of their destinies, and powerful in their
businesses/industries/artistic development.
At the 2014 Variety Power of Women Luncheon in Beverly Hills, California,
model Chrissy Teigen told the Huffington Post that feminism evoked self-
governing her own reality, saying, “It’s having the power to do whatever the fuck
you want. It’s about having your own beliefs and staying true to them.”15
Then CEO Tory Burch16 and actress Kerry Washington17 have echoed the
same sentiment.
With many high-earning, public women espousing operating as individuals,
“feminism” was reduced to a self-empowerment strategy. A way to get things. A
way to get more of the things you thought you deserved. A way to consume. But
it also performed something far more sinister: “feminism” became automatically
imbued with agency and autonomy, starting popular feminist discourse with a
lack of class literacy. Centering popular feminism there meant that the women
and other marginalized genders who didn’t have the necessary means to secure
independence or power—in broader culture, in their families, in their
communities, in their workplaces—were not a part of this conversation about
becoming an optimized agent of self. Without an analysis of money, just the
assumption that everyone has enough or a lot, “feminist” conversations circled
loosely around claiming feminism as one’s own—rather than as an assembled
body to overcome systemic barriers.
Individualism made you a feminist.

Chapter Nine
How Heterosexism Kept Women in Their Place

WHETHER YOU WERE A soul-searching white feminist or a grassroots activist, the
same practice often derailed the movement from empowerment, collective
action, and progress. When women became too unified in their goals,
heterosexism was always the ideal way to keep them in their place. For many
radical groups, isolating and identifying heterosexism—the assumption of
heterosexuality as the default orientation—prompted a deep reckoning of values
and political priorities.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when women of color activists began participating in
civil rights causes, Black lesbian feminists felt increased exclusion and
discrimination from radical Black organizing, often intent on cementing
heterosexuality. To Black men and women, lesbianism was often framed as a
“white disease,”1 according to Barbara Smith, activist, author, and editor of
numerous Black feminist texts. Same-sex desire was (and still is) posited as an
affliction that seeped into the Black community from whiteness, redirecting
homosexuality as unnatural, a disease, but also something that has no origins in
Blackness. Chicana lesbian feminists battled the same dynamic, fundamentally
disagreeing with male organizers’ message in the Chicano Movement that both
lesbianism and feminism were white infections on their otherwise naturally and
entirely straight community.
Cheryl Clarke, a Black lesbian poet and activist, wrote about how this
understanding of homosexuality was silencing Black lesbians in This Bridge
Called My Back, observing in the 1983 book by Kitchen Table: Women of
Color Press:
Black lesbians who do work within “by-for-about-black-people” groups or
organizations either pass as “straight” or relegate our lesbianism to the so-
called “private” sphere. The more male-dominated or black national
bourgeois the organization or group, the more resistant to change, and
thus, the more homophobic and anti-feminist. In these sectors, we learn
to keep a low profile.2
In the same essay, Clarke observed that what heterosexist political groups were
actually perpetuating was domination and control through sexuality—for
women specifically, but people broadly. She wrote:
Wherever we, as lesbians, fall along this very generalized political
continuum [including bisexual women, sexually fluid women, and
women who do not identify], we must know that the institution of
heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist
institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us…. It is
profitable for our colonizers to confine our bodies and alienate us from
our own life processes as it was profitable for the European to enslave the
African…. And just as the foundation of Western capitalism depended
upon the North Atlantic slave trade, the system of patriarchal domination
is buttressed by the subjugation of women through heterosexuality. So,
patriarchs must extoll the boy-girl dyad as “natural” to keep us straight
and compliant in the same way the European had to extoll Caucasian
superiority to justify the African slave trade. Against that historical
backdrop, the woman who chooses to be a lesbian lives dangerously.3
Drawing out these important parallels between capitalism, colonialism, racism,
and heterosexism placed the vehemence against lesbianism in crucial context:
patriarchy per usual. For a number of feminists of color groups in the second
wave, they were learning that their male organizers and leaders were very invested
in maintaining male domination and superiority, despite the other progressive
causes they espoused.
Preserving this male hierarchy often meant invoking the taboo of lesbianism
to prevent women from getting too close—and also to further drive home that
women spending too much time together, without male oversight, was perverse,
sexually deviant, or somehow unnatural. Smith recounted how effective this
strategy was for preventing coalition building with women across race and
orientations:
Feminists have been portrayed as nothing but “lesbians” to the Black
community as well. There was a considerable effort in the early seventies
to turn the Black community off to feminism. You can look at
publications, particularly Black publications making pronouncements
about what the feminist movement was and who it reached that would
trivialize it, that would say no Black women were involved, that did
everything possible to prevent those coalitions between Black and white
women from happening because there was a great deal of fear. Black men
did not want to lose Black women as allies. And the white power structure
did not want to see all women bond across racial lines because they knew
that would be an unbeatable unstoppable combination. They did a very
good job.4
Within their respective organizing, Chicana lesbian feminists also identified how
comparable homophobic tactics were used by not just the men in the Chicano
movement, but, perhaps more importantly, by the women in their lives. Keeping
the patriarchal order of family, author Carla Trujillo wrote in Chicana Lesbians:
The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, is work often carried out by Chicana
women:
Though our fathers had much to do with imposing sexual conformity, it
was usually our mothers who actually whispered the warnings, raised the
eyebrows, or covertly transmitted to us the “taboo nature” of same-sex
relationships…. Our very existence upsets the gender-specific role playing
our mothers so aggressively employ.5
That women, whether they were feminist identified or not, were instrumental in
sustaining the heterosexism of their communities revealed a lot about the
expectations of gender and conventional femininity women communicated to
one another. Dr. Cristina Herrera described this tactic best: “Mothers thus
(hetero)sexualize their daughters to fit into a system of patriarchy.”6
Identifying the mandate or assumption to be straight allowed lesbian
Chicana feminists, and their allies, to develop a broader lens for understanding
gender oppression. According to assistant professor Yvette J. Saavedra, these
women erected a multifaceted understanding of gender: that not all women
experience oppression in the same way. She observed in 2001:
Unlike the heterosexual feminists who did not account for the different
identities of the activists, lesbians allowed for difference in not only
individual characteristics but also for the differences in oppression each
woman faced. Some for example addressed classism, understanding that
not all Chicanas [sic] lesbians were working-class, which was an
assumption that Chicanismo demanded. Some addressed physical
challenges. Some argued for inclusion of many types of sexual expression
—overt, covert, and including celibacy. What Chicana lesbians achieved in
allowing for the differences among the women was a more complete kind
of feminism that unlike heterosexual feminists, incorporated more than
just gender oppression.7
Doing away with heterosexism, or even just acknowledging its presence, was the
impetus for opening up their feminism to include these other realities.
Such was also an important pillar of fat activism in the United States, in
which fat Americans of varying ideologies resisted the relentless culture of
thinness, in both the beauty and medical industry. This rejection of a
homogenous, binary female body as thin, dainty, and conventionally feminine
has distinctly queer overlap, posit some academics and fat activists. Dr. Amy
Erdman Farrell, a professor of American Studies and Women, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies, argues in her book Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in
American Culture that “lesbian feminism and a ‘queering’ of dominant
ideologies of gendered beauty shaped the entire fat empowerment movement,
from the most heterosexually oriented fat acceptance to the most radical lesbian
fat activism.”8 Stepping outside gendered beauty standards includes size, to
which fat activists have devoted much of their lives.
This activism is far reaching and dates back to a fat-in in 1967 in which five
hundred people protested anti-fat bias in New York City’s Central Park. Marilyn
Wann, founder of the fat zine FAT!SO? in 1994 (and later a book), became a fat
activist after she was reportedly denied health insurance, at age twenty-six,
because of her weight.9 Of this discrimination, she later said, “I had no
significant history of illness or injury. I was just fat.”10 This seemed consistent
with other cultural messaging about feeling “like not quite a person”11 in her
teens and young adult life, with the overarching message that eroticism, desire,
career success, and marriage were simply not possible because of her size. And
much like the disability activists in chapter four, Wann—and many other
activists—began to see this as not a personal problem, but a systemic one.
Participating in fat activism shifted this perspective—namely by recognizing the
commonality in shaming and stigmatizing fat people. On her website, Wann
writes:
We live in a fat-hating society. To change it, first we have to see it.
Examples of weight prejudice are everywhere, but that doesn’t make it
necessary or true. Anti-fat attitudes come from and reinforce sexism,
racism, classism, ableism, healthism, and homophobia. When you
encounter a lie, remember: someone is profiting from it. Don’t buy the
lie. Your weight does not define your worth.12
To Wann’s point, fat stigma in the United States and abroad developed as a
distinct oppression, primarily in response to building anxieties about men and
women enjoying middle-class comforts. Societal concerns about a new leisure
class developing, who could enjoy more rest, food, consumerism, and lounging
opportunities, hardened pretty quickly into disdain for the fat. (Prior to this
cultural shift, fatness had been considered a sign of robust health.) But in
creating a hierarchy of acceptable bodies versus unacceptable ones, fat stigma
also pulled considerably from racist, classist, and sexist ideologies. Not-thin
bodies were interpreted as not as controlled, not as “civilized,” and therefore
indicative of savagery. Dr. Farrell observes of this history, “Fatness, then, served
as yet another attribute demarcating the divide between civilization and
primitive cultures, whiteness and blackness, good and bad.”13 This has further
solidified into a beauty standard, a class standard, an intelligence standard, and, I
would also argue, a worthy person standard. And all of this pulls water from the
well that Black bodies, Indigenous bodies, are inferior.
This perception brutally collides with gender when you factor in the colonial
and white supremacist interpretation that women of these ilks weren’t
necessarily deemed “women” in the first place. That when physicians, scholars,
thinkers, editors, and government officials used terms like “women” generally in
reports, in medical advisories, in statements, they often weren’t talking about the
women they were oppressing, whose land they had stolen, who cleaned their
homes, who cared for their children, who later made it possible for their wives to
leave the domestic sphere entirely. To counter this standardized perception of
women and gender, many fat activists have challenged heterosexist principles.
Wann’s activism, for example, also takes the form of participating in public
eroticism and performance—two dimensions that fat people are often excluded
from within mainstream culture. In addition to speaking extensively on weight
diversity, she has also performed with Fat-Bottom Revue, a fat burlesque show
created by activist Heather MacAllister.14 In 2003, Wann described stripping as
a fat woman as “counter-propaganda”15 to dominant messaging about who gets
to be desired sexually. Wann is also a founding member of Padded Lilies, a
synchronized swimming group for fat women in Oakland, California,
established by activist Shirley Sheffield. The Padded Lilies perform publicly (and
have also appeared on The Tonight Show), and that’s the goal. To get people to
look at them. And it has riot-adjacent intentions. As Wann explained to Dr.
Farrell, “fat people everywhere… Get mad! Then get a bathing suit!”16
And this is where fat activism gets queer. Wann personally identifies as
straight, but Dr. Farrell asserts that an innate queerness is being exercised in
Wann’s activism and other efforts like it that eroticize the fat body, writing, “…
all fat women who claim their own beauty are queer, challenging the notion of
properly gendered and embodied ‘civilized’ woman.”
Challenging what bodies should be, what they should look like, and what
kind of sex they should consent to ultimately leads to a reflection on gender
anyway.

Chapter Ten
The Future Isn’t Female; It’s Gender Fluid

“THE FUTURE IS FEMALE” phrase that has since dotted many mainstream feminist
arguments has become representative of a lot of ideologies, depending on who
you talk to. The alliterative reference speaks to a sort of inevitable feminist
utopia—a rejiggering of gender dynamics and power that we’re all hurtling
toward—but also of women’s increasing professional prowess, resources, and
ingenuity. I’ve heard the phrase used in reference to changes in rape culture, in
wielding of political influence, in praise of women’s presence in corporate
America and growing entrepreneurial acumen. I’ve also heard it used in
reference to projections and statistics about how the world is shifting in “our”
favor, like some women eventually owning two-thirds of private wealth.1
Somewhat analogous to the “pro-woman” rhetoric that was used with me
during my job interview, “the future is female” has unfortunately swelled to
encompass anything and everything remotely female and positive.
How this phrasing came to represent so much mirrors how it came into the
mainstream in the first place. Stated by Hillary Clinton in 2017 after President
Trump’s inauguration,2 the motto had been slowly burning in the broader
culture for about two years before, after queer public figures like singer St.
Vincent and her then partner Cara Delevingne started wearing apparel with the
phrase. According to Google, the first noted spike in public interest in “the
future is female” arose in 2015, with a peak search in early 2017 (around the
time Clinton used it). And most tellingly, the top searches were all about stuff,
like “the future is female shirt,” “future is female sweatshirt.”3 (Notably, when
Otherwild, a queer clothing brand, started selling the T-shirts, a portion of the
clothing profits went to Planned Parenthood.)4
It didn’t originate this way. “The future is female” has a deeply radical history
that begins with lesbian separatists. How a lesbian separatist “call to arms” ended
up on a Nordstrom clothing rack and came to embody everything from
shameless capitalist ascension to Instagram hashtags, is the perfect case study in
white feminism.
The phrase was originally printed on T-shirts in the 1970s to promote New
York City’s first women’s bookstore, Labyris Books. Founded by lesbian-
identified feminists, they used the space to explore racism and activism. In 1975,
Liza Cowan, a photographer, began taking pictures of lesbians for a slideshow
on coming out and the change of physical presentation. One of the women she
photographed was her then girlfriend, activist Alix Dobkin, who was wearing a
“The future is female” T-shirt in bold blue font. That photograph then lived in
the severely underfunded and underappreciated queer women’s archives—a
primarily volunteer effort to preserve history for people who are often told they
don’t have one.
In 2015, Rachel Berks, founder and owner of Otherwild, reportedly saw the
vintage photo of Dobkin on the @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y Instagram,5 an account
founded by Kelly Rakowski dedicated to preserving “dyke imagery.” Berks
revived the phrasing in a contemporary line for Otherwild that sold out quickly.
(St. Vincent reportedly bought two Otherwild sweatshirts and was
photographed wearing one.) Berks told the New York Times in 2015 that it was
exciting to watch a lesbian separatist sentiment be “embrace[d]” by so many
people, as the sales seemed to show. Upon seeing “The future is female” take on
a new popularity, she interpreted the phrase as “a reaction to a misogynist and
patriarchal culture that affects a lot of people.”6 Cowan observed the meaning
this way: “It’s kind of a call to arms, and it’s a statement of fact.”7
The timeline of the “future is female” acceleration moves very quickly after
that. Shortly after the Otherwild collection became available, Delevingne started
her own “The future is female” shirt line to benefit the Girl Up organization,
and then the phrase started to appear on apparel at Topshop and ASOS. Some
four years after St. Vincent was photographed wearing a sweatshirt from a small,
queer, woman-owned business, you can now purchase a rendition everywhere
from Nordstrom to Net-a-Porter. And that doesn’t even include the myriad key
chains, tote bags, stickers, magnets, pins, and prints or the modifications of the
phrase that have appeared elsewhere, like “Females are the future” and “The
future is a female.”8
There are many components to this dilution, including the unfortunate
impacts of celebrity, demand of consumers, business opportunity, but also, it
should be said, good intentions.
One of the points Berks made to the New York Times was that she was taken
with the way a gender-specific mantra was being adapted to a less binary-centric
future. She told the outlet, “People are recontextualizing it: trans women, men,
moms who have sons.”
But as “The future is female” has been adapted into the mainstream, that
recontextualizing hasn’t always carried through. And in feminist-branded
conferences, in panel discussions, in female-centric work spaces, it’s often used
to affirm a gender binary rather than challenge it.
When addressing the “Here’s an example of women making money and
therefore exhibiting value” white feminist talking point, outlets often assert
some variation of “Why the (Entrepreneurial) Future Is Female.”9 And they are
clearly only talking about people who identify as female or women. The binary
is sanctioned yet again, to my assessment, in 2016 when Puma CEO, Bjørn
Gulden, observed of their lucrative partnership with singer Rihanna that “the
future is female.”10 Or when Money20/20, a global conference for the finance
industry, released a report on cisgender spending power titled “The Future Is
Female.”11 The same can be said for Marie Claire’s 2017 May cover story, which
read “The Future Is Female,” showcasing five separate cisgender cover stars. 12
Not surprisingly and completely unironically, cisgender women who do not
challenge the binary make a lot of money for companies, and for themselves, and
are reaffirmed as pretty, sexy, influential, and having cultural value. (I could have
told you this without a glossy photoshoot or stylists.) These narratives uphold
the dangerous and pernicious claim that there are only two genders—and they
are using a lesbian separatist mantra to do it.
This is not entirely divorced from the mantra’s original intention or the
questionable gender politics that surrounded it. Lesbian separatism and some
forms of radical lesbianism have a history of perpetuating the binary to the
denigration, exclusion, and abuse of transgender women, transgender men, and
a variety of gender-nonconforming and gender-variant people.
In 1973, Sylvia Rivera, a Latina and trans rights activist, notably left the
mainstream gay rights movement after being publicly denigrated by Jean
O’Leary, a feminist lesbian activist and the cofounder of National Coming Out
Day. At a gay rights rally in Washington Square Park, O’Leary and the women’s
rights group she founded, Lesbian Feminist Liberation, distributed fliers
opposing drag queens and transgender women as “female impersonators,” and
refusing them space on the stage. Drag queens who had come to the rally to
perform and to speak to their disenfranchisement were physically barred from
addressing the crowd. Rivera recalled of the experience, “I had to fight my way
onto that stage and literally, people that I called my comrades in the movement,
literally beat the shit out of me.”13
Rivera’s visible presence in the movement troubled quite a few queer
organizers because she did not neatly fit into their limited understandings of
gender. But they were also trying to establish a certain amount of distance
between their demonstrations and “street people,” as Arthur Bell, the cofounder
of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), remembered.14 This derogatory assessment
was an attack on Rivera on all fronts: as a trans woman, as a sex worker, as a
Latina, as a poor woman—and from the very community she was trying to
establish alliances with. Rivera had attempted to join forces with these groups
after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, attending meetings and proposing unified
political action. But Bell recalls that her multi-disenfranchised identity and
gender expression identified her as “a troublemaker”15 to GAA. Once again,
upsetting the order and primacy of cisgender people, of middle-class people, of
white people was met with scorn and a get-back-in-your-lane attitude by radical
queers.
Historian and gay rights activist Martin Duberman observed the layered way
that gays and lesbians pushed back on Rivera’s presence and her questioning of
societal order: “if someone was not shunning her darker skin or sniggering at her
passionate, fractured English, they were deploring her rude anarchism as
inimical to order or denouncing her sashaying ways as offensive to
womanhood.”16
Rivera was not the only trans or gender-nonconforming person that
cisgender gays and lesbians belittled and attacked within assessments of their
political standing. After news of the Stonewall Riots reached the rest of the gay
community, reactions about who had resisted police arrest elicited not sympathy
or solidarity, but mockery. Duberman observed:
Many wealthier gays, sunning at Fire Island or in the Hamptons for the
weekend, either heard about the rioting and ignored it… or caught up
with the news belatedly. [They described the riot as] “regrettable,” as the
demented carryings-on of “stoned, tacky queens”—precisely those
elements in the gay world from whom they had long since disassociated
themselves.17
The ability to assimilate to some version of respectable straight society through
wealth or whiteness was clearly the short-sighted goal—a goal to which people
like Rivera would never ascend. But also, and more importantly, Rivera didn’t
want to. That wasn’t the point. Much like the working-class immigrant
housewives who were adamant that they had rights as not-rich women, Rivera’s
politics echo a similar ethos: I have rights as a poor trans Latina sex worker. And
I’m not out here trying to be a bougie white gay man to get them.
Rivera saw a number of these power dynamics in the queer community very
clearly, a lens she no doubt acquired from participating in activism within the
women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the anti–Vietnam War
effort. For example, Rivera assessed the landscape of the Stonewall Inn this way:
“a white male bar for middle-class males to pick up young boys of different
races.”18 Her description alludes to who had the power in this queer space: white
cis men with money. And Rivera also makes a point to illuminate who didn’t:
the “boys” of color. (Stonewall did not respond to my repeated requests for
comment.) The space was also, to her account, dictated by the penchants of the
power holders: they only wanted cisgender boys there.
Decidedly not a space for drag queens or transgender people, gender-
nonconforming people were often turned away from the Stonewall Inn because,
the logic went, they courted police trouble with their inability to follow the
binary. Rivera was only seventeen years old herself on the night of the riot and
managed to get in, to go dancing, because she knew people within the bar. But
when the police arrived and the patrons began resisting arrest, it was people like
Rivera—the “street people”—who have been credited with leading the effort.
Rivera told Leslie Feinberg, the author of Stone Butch Blues, “It was street gay
people from the Village out front—homeless people who lived in the park in
Sheridan Square outside the bar—and then drag queens behind them and
everybody behind us.”19
Author Jessi Gan supported this account, noting in the collection Are All the
Women Still White? that although the Stonewall Inn patrons were largely white
and normatively gendered, it was the gender-nonconforming, working-class,
people of color who were fighting back. “Those who had most been targets of
police harassment, those who were most socially and economically marginalized,
fought most fiercely,” Gan writes.
Yet, after the riots, the press coverage collapsed the efforts of gender-variant
people, describing the riot as simply “gay.” In recounting this erasure of
transgender and gender-variant activism—enacted by both straight and gay
publications—Gan observed:
For instance, the headline of a September 1969 article in the Advocate
magazine, originally written for the New York Mattachine Newsletter, was
“Police Raid on N.Y. Club Sets Off First Gay Riot.” This formulation—
that the Stonewall uprising was a “gay riot”—consolidated gender-
nonconforming people, poor people, and people of color under the
identity category of “gay.” But it could not explain why police targeted
some “gay” people for harsher treatment.20
As Rivera’s life encapsulates, some of this “harsher treatment” originated within
the gay rights movement itself. O’Leary, the lesbian feminist whose organization
distributed fliers against trans women and drag queens, later expressed regret for
disenfranchising gender-nonconforming people in her activism. “Looking
back,” she said in the 1990s, “I find this so embarrassing because my views have
changed so much since then. I would never pick on a transvestite now.”21 By the
2000s, she had vocalized parallels between the women’s movement’s disdain for
working with lesbians to her own mistakes, saying, “It was horrible. How could I
work to exclude transvestites and at the same time criticize the feminists who
were doing their best back in those days to exclude lesbians?”22
But traditional “women-only” spaces are still dusted with this binary-centric
legacy, and it’s a tension that rightfully arises again and again—in festivals, sports
teams, community centers, clubs, and in education. Particularly at women’s
colleges in the United States, often founded on a basic understanding of
institutionalized sexism that placed women at a disadvantage, the question of
trans inclusion was a long time coming.
The very idea that there are only two genders is a distinctly colonial and racist
interpretation. In many First Nations communities, people existed along a
continuum of gender diversity, including two-spirit, third genders, and a variety
of Indigenous terms. It was colonialists, armed with their Christian rhetoric,
that rejected this understanding of people, and mandated that there were two
distinct genders with respective performances (they also were adamant that
women perform that gender in subservience to men).
In Canada’s sweeping report detailing the colonial links to missing women
and girls, the authors identified how this particular violence was inflicted on all
genders:
In particular, missionaries denounced people demonstrating non-binary
gendered identities, including, later, within residential or mission schools,
where those in charge punished children for inappropriate gender
behaviour. As it became more and more dangerous, and even illegal under
the prosecution of the crime of “buggery,” to show these characteristics,
and due to government and missionary intervention, many families
intervened to prevent their own members from showing them, or because
they had converted themselves.23
Why affirm this colonialist mythology? And more importantly, why continue it
with binary-centric language and policies?
That my liberal arts college did not have a policy affirming trans women as
prospective students was exclusion in practice. We knew it, some of our
professors and administrators very well knew it, but it wouldn’t be until 2013
that I would read about it.
That year, Calliope Wong, a transgender woman applicant, was denied the
opportunity to have her Smith College application read given that she had
marked “male” on her financial aid documents.24 In the rejection letter she
received from Smith College, and then posted on her Tumblr account, the
school reasoned, “Smith is a women’s college, which means that undergraduate
applicants to Smith must be female at the time of admission. Your FAFSA
indicates your gender as male. Therefore, Smith cannot process your
application.”25 According to Smith’s policy, all supporting documents for
incoming students, from transcripts to recommendations, had to “reflect her
status as a woman.”26 (A Smith College spokesperson told ABC News in 2013,
“Someone whose paperwork consistently reflects female identity will be
considered for admission. Every application is considered on a case-by-case basis.
A trans-student at Smith, like every student, receives the full support of the
college.”)27
Wong was from Connecticut and Smith College is located in Massachusetts,
two states that mandated a surgeon’s letter confirming gender-affirming surgery
or a court order to formally register a sex change.
This is a colossal economical, physical, emotional, social, and bureaucratic
hurdle to ask any eighteen-year-old college applicant to clear just to participate in
gender-specific spaces. On her Tumblr, Wong laid out how unfeasible this was—
but also, how absurd it was for the state to dictate what surgical procedures she
needed to have to be recognized as the gender she identified with:
But in order to be legally recognized as “female” on my birth certificate
according to BOTH Massachusetts and Connecticut law, I have to
undergo vaginoplasty (feminizing genital surgery). From what I
understand, Smith College will only evaluate me as a “real” girl if I get sex
reassignment surgery…. Transwomen are most likely not ready for surgery
at 17 or 18, the typical age of a college applicant. It’s a monumental
personal decision that usually arises from years of introspection and
deliberation.28
Wong erected a national campaign, “Trans Women @ Smith,”29 to protest the
decision, which included a petition demanding a revised admissions policy.30
Wong’s efforts have been credited with significantly pressuring women’s colleges
around the United States to increase their trans and gender literacy beyond cis-
centric “women’s studies.” In May 2014, Mills College became the first women’s
college in the United States to formalize a transgender admissions policy. The
new policy clarified that anyone who was assigned female at birth or self-
identifies as female, transgender, or gender fluid is welcome to apply. (Students
who come out as male over the course of their time at Mills can stay through
graduation, but applicants who identify as male will not be considered.) Six
other women’s colleges, including Smith, quickly followed suit with similar
policies. (In 2020, a Mills representative told me of the decision, “Keeping with
our nearly 170-year history of breaking barriers for women, Mills viewed trans
inclusiveness as an extension of our mission to seek gender and racial justice.” ln
2015, Kathleen McCartney, the president of Smith College, told the New York
Times, “We came to the collective decision that trans women are women and
belong at Smith.”31)
But, as disabled activism has revealed, there are directly exclusionary policies
and language—you can’t be here, we won’t admit you, we won’t give you access—
and then there are exclusionary environments that are more subtle: language
that doesn’t include you, bathrooms you can’t use, teachers who don’t consider
your basic needs. For my alma mater specifically, the formalizing of this student
policy was the result of a much bigger investigation into expanding gendered
experiences in an otherwise single-sex environment. To simply declare, openly,
that trans and gender-fluid students can attend does not automatically mean
that they can—there are always structural barriers in place. Various faculty
members chaired a Gender Identity and Expression sub-committee on campus
with students to address these barriers and other factors.32 Together, they
produced the “Report on Inclusion of Transgender and Gender Fluid Students:
Best Practices, Assessment and Recommendations,” detailing a variety of
changes that could better improve the campus for people who do not identify as
cis women.
It should be noted that only one of these recommendations was a formalized
and public policy on transgender and gender-fluid applicants. There are more.
In the fall of 2014, the first year that the formal policy would be recognized,
sophomore Eileen Sochi was quoted by the school newspaper as saying, “I hope
that instead of just saying that it’s okay for them to come here, they actually
actively recruit transgender students.”33 Another sophomore, Sarah O’Neal,
said, “And make it financially accessible, not just for white trans women.”
This remains an ongoing effort.
These strides to integrate broader notions of gender and gender equality into
mainstream feminism were by in large pushed for by younger people in the
2010s. Yet, at the same time, young people were also being indoctrinated into a
new feminism that would reawaken elitist, white feminist suffragette values and
strongly recommit allegiance to capitalism, power, and individualism. What
would come next would completely redefine the way we discuss gender as a
culture.

Part II

White FeminismTM: When the Movement Went Corporate
And, as consumers, they practiced their rights as women.
—Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage1

Chapter Eleven
When White Feminism Got “Branded”

BY THE TIME BEYONCÉ took the stage in the 2014 VMAs, the groundwork was
already being laid for aligning feminism with corporate interests and individuals’
corporate ascensions. After years of feminism being “radical” and “militant,” it
was suddenly in. That same year, actress and founder of the Honest Company,
Jessica Alba, was featured in an Us Weekly piece titled “Jessica Alba: Why I Love
Being a Female CEO, Running My Own Business,” paralleling the success of her
household goods company with her “mission from day one as an actress and an
early feminist wanting equality and wanting to push the limits of what’s
possible.”1 In 2013, the toymaker GoldieBlox, founded by Stanford graduate
and engineer Debbie Sterling to encourage girls to go into STEM fields, was
widely credited with a “feminist message” in their popular advertisements.2
Period-product subscription service HelloFlo also swept the internet with their
viral advertisement of a twelve-year-old girl giddily recounting how she became
“the camp gyno” after being the first camper to get her period. The triumph was
credited as “feminism and commercialism combined,” according to The Verge.3
And to top it all off, internationally celebrated and Grammy-winning singer
Taylor Swift clarified that she was in fact a feminist, and actually had been all
along4—positioning her empowerment anthems and brand with a directly
feminist hue: her 2014 “Blank Space” music video was described by author and
Feministing cofounder Jessica Valenti as a “dystopian feminist fairytale.”5
And the feminist promise from Alba’s business empire through women-
founded startups and Swift’s epiphany were eerily similar: wealth and business
will set you free.
In 2013, the publication of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by
Sheryl Sandberg based on her viral 2010 TED Talk, “Why We Have Too Few
Women Leaders,” would be credited with engendering a national conversation
about women’s experiences in the workplace while simultaneously cementing a
new iteration of white feminism. The phenomenon of “leaning in”—i.e.,
instructing women to achieve professional success by sitting closer to the
proverbial table and not giving way to conditioned timidity—would plow
through the next decade.
Post-Trump, we are knee-deep in #Resistance-wear, which puts phrases like
“Nasty Women Unite” and “Nevertheless, She Persisted” on everything from cell
phone covers to mugs to tote bags.6 #Feminism is abundant, particularly for
marketers who would like me to purchase my politics on T-shirts, buttons,
stickers, and even makeup.7 There is apparently feminist lipstick, according to
Glamour.com.8 Money management is feminist now.9 At my most recent
editorship, I was sent a galley of a forthcoming book on a “feminist” guide to
maintaining personal health.
And much like the white feminism practiced by some suffragettes, all of these
profit-oriented and transactional intersections with politics have produced a
“feminist lifestyle”—an aesthetic, a series of slogans, symbols, colors, and
shorthands to live on flags or mugs, depending on if it’s 1920 or 2020, but all
available for purchase. Co-working spaces, clubs, conferences, branded
experiences—that are very much tied to a Macy’s or Cosmopolitan magazine or
The Wing.
Coming to feminism with a centralizing of self was concurrent with the
sharp mass uptick in “women’s empowerment,” a term that was searched to
peak popularity on Google in 2014. Sanitizing “empowerment” away from
radical, deeply historic activism was pivotal for fourth-wave white feminism
because it had to become transactional—something you could buy, obtain, and
experience as a product rather than an amorphous feeling that rushed in from
challenging power.
This commercial approach to empowerment, or “empowerment,” manifested
not just in the emergence of “feminist”-branded products (key chains, T-shirts,
and tote bags) but in the construction and design of “feminist experiences.” The
same year of peak “women’s empowerment” Googling, Cosmopolitan launched
its first-ever Fun Fearless Life conference, “geared toward young women
primarily in their 20s who are looking for career advice and inspiration,”
according to WWD. Then editor in chief of Cosmopolitan Joanna Coles
reportedly developed the conference with talent agency WME after “the
magazine debut[ed] an excerpt of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In,” said The
Hollywood Reporter.10 And the Lean In influence was everywhere.
I covered the 2014 event, a two-day lineup of panels and networking
opportunities where tickets ranged from $99 to $399, at Lincoln Center with
my then colleague. What I remember more than the fuchsia lighting and array of
aggressively digital tablets for check-ins, young women in business-casual attire
confirming the spelling of my name with a cadence that only brings to mind
sleepovers from junior high, is a curious sort of, So this is feminism now?
Business cards and cocktail hour and young women who wanted to tell me all
about their business ventures. Did I want to invest? Did I want to become a
customer? Did I want to partner over their e-commerce leg?
These are the conversations that hovered just over the Maybelline-sponsored
makeover station and balkanized a day in which Sara Blakely, the CEO of Spanx,
told us how to make six figures in the first five years out of college.11 But while
fevered attendees were whooping up thin blond speakers and scribbling down
their “style spirit animal” for their name tag (I found the entire exercise puzzling
and put down “Rose Byrne”), many women of color couldn’t have even afforded
to walk in the door. Around the time of this initial conference, the median
wealth for single Black women and Latinas was $200 and $100, respectively.12
This means that even the cheapest ticket for attendance would cost all if not half
the money they don’t otherwise put toward living expenses. You know what the
median wealth for white women was? $15,640.13
This is how the business of feminism stays middle class and white in practice.
How conversations about optimizing your “career, health, and love life” are
reserved for certain women and decidedly not others. The very basic framework
of their lives is not considered for entry.
Even more overt than the price tag, though, was the way in which gendered
challenges were presented to us. The biggest trademark of the Fun Fearless Life
conference, and others like it that I would attend over the years, was the overall
assertion that we could overcome any barrier with enough personal strategy.
Enough organization. Enough savvy. Enough list-making. (Catherine
Rottenberg, author of The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, describes this approach
as “a calculative matrix” to achieving empowerment and gender equality.)14
This messaging is incredibly enticing because it erases complex systems and
casts you as the maker of your own fate. Deeply institutionalized heterosexist,
classist, sexist, and ableist impediments are reframed as something you as a
feminist mastermind can control for and overcome. This narrative perpetuates
the important cornerstone of white feminism that you can prevail over these
circumstances through elaborate personal design. Whether it’s business, “work-
life balance,” lifestyle, or romance, “empowerment” is a process of being an
optimized individual in the face of gender or racial discrimination, not part of a
collective uprising or an assembled body against systems or institutions.
Even more dangerously, this mindset also aligns being “pro-woman” with
being entirely self-seeking. The self becomes the dominant lens by which you
metabolize oppression, reframed narrowly as a lack of business opportunity, a
lack of seed money, a lack of confidence, a lack of stamina, a lack of an ability to
simply believe in yourself. This entryway into understanding gendered
experiences is not only limiting given the pronounced class advantages to be at
such a conference, but it doesn’t even encourage attendees to look outside their
own distinct experiences of gender in these “pro-women” contexts.
But where there are no structural critiques of systemic enterprises that keep
some women and nonbinary people out of economic security or affluence, there
are ample opportunities to sell them products and experiences to get there. In
2014, the same year that Cosmopolitan debuted Fun Fearless Life, the New York
Times noted, “Conferences promoting women’s empowerment are on the rise
and haven’t had this kind of cachet since the feminist movement encouraged
consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s.”15 “Women-focused events” included
Women in Washington by the National Journal, Women of Washington by The
Atlantic, and How to Command a Room by More magazine. Tina Brown and
Arianna Huffington notably grew their respective conference empires, Women
in the World and Thrive Global. The growth of both Glamour’s Women of the
Year Awards and Fortune’s Most Powerful Women franchise were also reported.
The “rise of conferences on women’s empowerment” was happening so fast
that Lesley Jane Seymour, then editor in chief of More, told the outlet, “I feel
like we’re reaching kind of a saturation point. I feel like it’s everywhere.
Everybody’s doing it; everybody’s trying to get in on this.” Especially advertisers.
The Times was clear that while those “consciousness-raising groups in the
1970s” were hosted by friends and in nearby living rooms, corporate sponsors
were seeing this as a lucrative space to scoop up customers, and get way closer to
them than a traditional print advertisement. Unlike those homegrown
consciousness-raising groups, in which finding commonalities across gendered
experiences and traumas was often the aim, these blown-out affairs were
incentivized to create profits for struggling businesses. The Times reported that:
… the major driver for the expanding women’s conference scene is that as
magazine companies struggle with problems in their core print businesses
—declining newsstand sales and soft advertising—these events bring in
additional revenue. Ken Doctor, a media analyst, said there had been a
shift to more conferences because companies hesitant to spend on print
advertising see more value in sponsoring events.
This evolution of business strategy, in which you can literally interact with a
brand amidst smoke machines, flashing lights, and giveaway bags is the
continuation of traditional women’s media’s longstanding relationship with
advertisers.
This alliance is felt in all corners of certain outlets I’ve worked for, even if it’s
not explicitly stated. That’s how power works; no one has to tell you directly
because it’s implied along the contours of every interaction you have. You can
read it along people’s voices and within the tempo of the emails that appear
without a professional signature. It’s mirrored back in colleague’s inflections and
you can detect it in glances to phones that, at first, seem unprompted. But
regardless of what is said or not said, it’s been very clear when I’ve proposed a
story idea that might offend an advertiser, as the scolding that follows is to
ensure that I don’t do it again. What is messaged over and over again is that this
is paramount. This is a structure, a way of negotiating and dictating authority
and control, that must be maintained.
Advertising has always dictated what stories, content, and talent are
showcased in traditional women’s media because they pay the bills. Print media
broadly has historically sustained its revenue through print ads, which is why
with digital consumption (whether it’s websites, Instagram, or online video)
print magazines have financially suffered to stay afloat. From an advertiser’s
standpoint, it’s much more financially sustainable to put your ads where the
most people will see them—whether it’s “branded content” (ads you are not
supposed to know are ads because they are embedded in a personal essay or
narrative online), giving your products to influencers and editors (to put on
their personal Instagram feeds or the brand’s), or these interactive conferences.
But branded content is hardly new. White feminist suffragists pioneered this
modern practice when they started establishing women’s suffrage publications.
To sustain their business efforts, cover overhead, and, frankly, just make a profit,
some publications started running what became known internally as “puffery.”
These pieces consisted of essentially product testimonials that were framed in
the publication as news items—to “puff up” the business or brand. And
sometimes, recognizable women’s rights activists wrote them, like when
renowned abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote an advice piece for The Women’s
Journal that praised one of the paper’s advertisers.16
Historians now recognize this protocol as ethically questionable, and yet I’ve
worked for women’s outlets a century later that routinely perform this same
allyship to brands. What would change in my lifetime, though, was that this
allyship would evolve. The same ethos would now rise off the printed (and later
digital) page to find newly engaged audiences.
The growth in women’s empowerment conferences, an ephemeral but physical
space by which to experience empowerment, and maybe even “feminism,”
opened the door for the resurgence in fixed feminist-identified spaces: paid
membership to women’s and nonbinary clubs—and of varying allegiances.
The Wing was central to the proliferation of this marketing opportunity, and
at the forefront of both identifying, building out, and popularizing the
contemporary concept of women’s-only and, later, nonbinary spaces. The co-
working “network”17 with conference rooms, private phone booths, plush pink
seating, phone-charging stations, glam room, pumping room, showers, lockers,
and always more than enough power outlets further blurred the dimensions of
white-collar work and feminism. Access to this network was reported in 2016 to
cost $1,950 for an annual membership, or $185 per month.
The same year that The Wing opened its first location, the New Women
Space was founded by Melissa Wong and Sandra Hong. Reportedly built more
on principles of access and event programming rather than co-working, the
founders told the Village Voice in 2017 that they were still tinkering with how to
best square their ethics with financial security.18 As of that year, they had hosted
their own workshops (on crafts, motherhood, and zines, respectively) while also
renting their space out to other groups and clubs. Their events were offered at a
$10-$25 range. An annual membership, which offered entrance to all events, was
$125.
By the end of the following year, Quartz reported that “Women’s-Only
Clubs Are Spreading As a Grassroots Movement,” citing the New York–based
super club, Wildflower Collective; HER Global Network, a then-fifteen-city
franchise of “friends and business contacts”; and The Tribe, described by
cofounder Lynne Guey as a “brain trust of sorts, for these ideas, similar to what
men have in their investing clubs or venture groups when they talk shop…”19
The trend, and seemingly successful business model for some, continued. In
2018, The Week documented “the rise of women-only co-working spaces”20 and
the Washington Post observed that same year that, “Women’s co-working spaces
are ascending in a year when women’s activism is at a height, and new attention
is being paid to workplace issues such as sexual harassment and equal pay.”21 In
this two-year window, The Wing expanded to multiple locations in New York
City and on to Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle,
Washington, D.C., and London. Pre-COVID-19, The Wing had revealed plans
to expand to Toronto and Paris.
One of the many reported appeals of these spaces, more so the ones that offer
access and proximity to elite people, is that cis men (and every piece of cultural
infrastructure that goes with them) were blocked at the door. This includes, but
is not limited to, some forms of sexual harassment, male space entitlement (both
for their physical manspreading and the added space necessary to accommodate
their egos), performative male optics (why is he flexing randomly?), male vocal
operatics (why is he talking across the entire room?), and an overall
decentralizing of the default cismale experience. Such was the platform
essentially offered by my private women’s college and that of many others: that
women (and later, other marginalized genders) are capable of doing deeper,
more impactful, and sometimes more rewarding work without having to divert
even a low-grade amount of energy to accommodating and existing beside
constructed masculinity. I could write a lot faster, better, stronger, if I didn’t
have to field advances just to plug in my laptop. I could actually concentrate if
that leery guy over there would stop staring at me and asking if he could buy me
a tea.
The deep appeal I remember from my women’s college was that, as a very
young woman, I was removed from the searing, demanding, and never-satiated
gaze of cis men. The ability to fall so deeply into critical race theory, into
research, into engrossed contemplation as to why things are, was never suddenly
broken by some guy looking down my shirt or interrupting my studies to tell me
how great he did on the last midterm. The concentration that was literally
afforded to me at this very formative time of my life was and still is unlike
anything I’ve ever experienced. It also illuminated for me as a teenager just how
many moments of reflection, of study, of deep consideration, had been taken
from me in moments of harassment. How a thought fell from me in the
moment that I was grabbed or catcalled or followed or had my space imposed
upon. I suddenly didn’t have thoughts because I had a body, a female body—
and that constant recentering of myself, by male harassers, the cerebral to
corporal, is what my private women’s college gave me relief from.
For many women and nonbinary people, they are describing some version of
this relief when they attest to the appeal of single-sex spaces or clubs. Where
clubs like The Wing continue this through line from the appeal of my alma
mater is money. It costs money (and in the case of both The Wing and my
college, a lot of money) to have this relief. A limited number of scholarships exist
to subsidize these costs for both spaces, underscoring how elite they are in the
first place.
The ample business opportunities in providing sanctuaries controlled for
some sexist encounters—that builds customer testimonials on relief from those
experiences—takes white feminism to new heights. That next level being that
the transactional nature of these spaces translates “feminists,” or gender-literate
people, into customers. (Many other businesses, brands, and clothing lines are
doing this as well, but usually with more tangible products, like “Feminist
Embroidered Espadrilles Smoking Slippers” at Bergdorf Goodman.22)
A women/nonbinary club built on elite ambition not only attracts women
who see money as central to empowerment, but also insulates them as
customers. Members are not just having feminist or empowered experiences
(however they align themselves on that spectrum), but customer experiences.
This dramatically changes what the space is, who it is for, and how people are
experiencing it. Because now they aren’t people; they are customers. If
customers are paying to be there, then they are exuding all the entitlement,
demand, and expectations that paying for a service, a product, and an experience
encompasses. Becoming customers also silently and implicitly protects their
single experience above all else. Anything that could compromise that customer
experience, whether it be discomfort, confrontation, or a challenge to ideals, is
incongruous with that unspoken relationship.
Funnily enough, this is precisely what white feminists need: encounters in
which their beliefs or gender ideology is questioned or punctured. But here, they
are paying to sanitize their empowering environment of exactly these scenarios.
The woman in the power suit became a media shorthand for a lot of concepts:
subversion, progress, and women’s rights. I began to understand this on the
inside when, upon reporting a story for MarieClaire.com, I was told that the
white lady in the corporate-cut suit “told the story faster” than the Black female
subject I had interviewed extensively for the same story.
The exaltation of corporate work built out a new dialogue through which to
sell products, and to an audience that had money to spend. (This focus also had
an odd linguistical crossover, in which women’s outlets like Glamour started
using terms like “lady boss” to describe why Mindy Kaling was a Woman of the
Year in 201423 and to inform us that Drew Barrymore had a “side hustle” in
2016.24) Given that traditional women’s media has always been in bed with
advertisers, dictating and reframing conversations to fit products, this cultural
shift was no different. When the dominant conversation around women (who
are only viewed as potential customers) shifted to career growth, advertisers were
right there to adapt to this empowering message—with stuff. And mainstream
women’s media was there to relay that message.
In addition to detailing the wage gap and promoting advice on negotiating a
raise, Elle.com offers “10 Wardrobe Staples That Will Make You Look and Feel
Like a Boss.”25 If you’re a #bossbitch who spends eighty hours a week in an
office anyway, Cosmopolitan.com boasts the “14 Best Candle Brands That’ll
Make You Want to Spend All Your Money.”26 If you’re building your own
business from home, then you clearly need to be “always working in style,”
according to “Boss Lady: 15 Chic Desktop Accessories” on HarpersBazaar.com,
which features calendars, notebooks, a cell phone dock, a lipstick paperweight,
and a diamond-shaped Post-it dispenser.27 These guides and lists also harnessed
the technological changes in office life into further spending opportunities, like
the 2016 Vogue.com piece “Got a Skype Interview? 8 Video-Friendly Looks
Guaranteed to Seal the Deal,” featuring a photo of Sophia Amoruso looking up
from a smartphone with her laptop, coffee, and tablet on her bed.28 Or a list of
anti-procrastination tips on Cosmopolitan.com that dually functions as an ad
for a timer, noise-canceling headphones, notepads, and notebooks.29 Or “The 5
Best Cell Phone Stands” from Bustle.com that displays an industrious-looking
woman at a desk, fielding messages from her iPhone screen with a pencil in
hand.30
What guides like these culturally accomplish in moments of shifting gender
roles is an affirmation that these roles won’t ultimately change that much.
Women will still prioritize shopping above all else and still remain more or less
gendered. Amidst demanding equal pay and senior roles and being able to speak
in a meeting, they will still buy accessories for their very feminist desks, find the
perfect “capsule” wardrobe, and ensure that all their tasks are completed on
time. Even with using terms like “feminist” and having open discussions about
societal factors like misogyny, the wage gap, and sexual harassment, these
feminists won’t upset the structures-that-be completely. They won’t turn over
their desks (they’ve spent too much money and time organizing them), walk out
of oppressive office cultures and threaten order, or demand anything truly
radical like six-month paid parental leave. These lists and guides function as a
kind of societal appeasement. They assuage by conveying that everything will
still be as it is and that “feminism” can actually reaffirm and bolster these
patriarchal systems.
This affirmation was exported to multiple industries and fields. “A new wave
of executive feminism has emerged aimed squarely at the highest levels of the
professional world,” a 2013 piece in Harvard Business Review announced.31 It
was in this climate that Sallie Krawcheck, former CEO of Merrill Lynch and
Wall Street analyst, launched the rebranded Ellevate Network in 2014, a
networking club for professional women. The following year, Anne-Marie
Slaughter, an attorney and the director of policy planning under President
Obama, published her book on gender inequality, Unfinished Business: Women
Men Work Family.
The way a lot of this “new wave of executive feminism” got translated back
into the culture was through a fixation on white-collar work and efficiency at the
proverbial desk. Being good at your very professional job was now very, very
feminist. Working ’round-the-clock shifts at a call center to support your
children as a single mother, for example, was decidedly not a part of this
purview.
Worshiping at the altar of desk-centric productivity became implicit in every
Work/Career/Job Advice vertical across a lot of newly feminist-minded
women’s outlets. Refinery29.com offers “5 Email Hacks That Will Boost Your
Productivity in a Big Way”32 while Glamour.com says “Struggling With Your
To-Do List? Try These Tricks to Be More Productive.”33 MarieClaire.com cites
“8 Productivity Apps to Help You Get Your Life Together”34 and Bustle.com
presents “11 Tips to Become the Most Productive Person You Know.”35 (That
these productivity pieces are framed directly around literal “productivity,” and
not softly packaged as anything else, says a lot about how intentional the
messaging was to the reader.)
Dangled at the end of many of the guides, tips, and advice articles is the
assumption that you as a reader want to rise within the ranks of your company,
business, or workplace, and that you inherently want to build capital, and
therefore power. Money, particularly the relentless pursuit of it, is unabashedly
feminist and any scenario, setting, accessory, blouse, or strategy that facilitates
getting money is also treated to the same singular narrative.
That women possessing money and women possessing power fused into one
overarching story was anchored in the personal stories of the women who now
dictated our mainstream feminist conversations. As entrepreneurs, CEOs,
COOs, managers, and founders, they outlined their guiding principles for
running an enterprise, which was then pasted up and framed as “equality.” Chief
among them was Sheryl Sandberg, who, a year after Lean In was published,
wrote a piece for the November 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan titled “Embrace
Your Power.” And by power, she meant “money”:
Financial planning is rarely taught in school. And making a budget isn’t
the most exciting part of anybody’s day. But neither is laundry, and we do
that. We also have years of stereotypes bearing down on us, sending the
message that men are better with money.
This has to change, because being financially savvy is essential to our
equality and empowerment. Don’t listen to that voice in your head that
says, Ugh, I don’t understand this 401(k). Almost nobody does at first,
including men. Start with the attitude that if you can follow the plotlines
of Scandal, you can definitely pick out a mutual fund.
This issue of Cosmo Careers is about tapping into your financial power.
We want to raise your confidence, buff your negotiation skills, and make
your paycheck go further.36
Braiding “equality,” “empowerment,” and “power” around a call for financial
literacy and increased negotiation prowess effectively asserts money as the sole
equalizer of all gender oppression you, as a reader, are encountering. That more
money in your hands, or a better use of it, is the key to neutralizing patriarchal
dominance and dependency.
What suffragettes did accomplish with these initiatives was establishing and
successfully asserting that white women were worthy of participation in spheres
outside the home; they were political entities separate from the men in their
lives. The problem is they achieved these rights by assuring the mass public that
other people were not: people who weren’t ladylike, who weren’t respectable,
who didn’t participate in society in an exact way. And that legacy endures.
Sandberg’s Lean In may not be a feminist manifesto, but it’s definitely a white
feminism manifesto.
Her central premise, which rightly bristled feminist writers, of offering
strategies to succeed within the patriarchal work culture rather than eradicating
it from the top would become the road map for fourth-wave white feminism—a
next generation of the white feminism perpetuated by Betty Friedan, Alice Paul,
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And her advice for doing so involved such
patriarchy-accommodating tips as advising that women smile,37 omit the use of
“I” during salary negotiations,38 and invite their bosses to know their
childrearing timeline39—indignities, the disappearance of self for the comfort of
others, and privacy violations, but I suppose, to Sandberg’s overall book thesis,
leaning in and basking in those spoils.
While Sandberg did call for “[g]overnmental and company policies such as
paid personal time off, affordable high-quality child care, and flexible work
practices,”40 she couches Lean In in the assertion that she’s focused on personal
strategies (rather than systemic change) because “[we] can dismantle the hurdles
in ourselves today.”41 Implying that governmental failures are either too lofty or
too far off to advocate for.
Michelle Goldberg wrote for the Daily Beast that recognizing Sandberg’s
“manifesto” was founded in personal fixes gave Lean In “context”:
Her book is largely about how to do that within the context of a sexist
society. It’s written with an understanding that the deck is stacked against
women, and the hope that if more women become more powerful they
might be able to change that.42
This is the same “context” that often dictates how women’s value is
quantified. The study that tends to be popular on the panels I sit on—whipped
out to evidence a point about how valuable women are—is the big 2016 study
from Peterson Institute for International Economics and EY that examined
21,980 global publicly traded companies in 91 countries.43 Across industries and
sectors, researchers found that employing women in at least 30 percent of
leadership positions, or the “C-suite,” adds 6 percent to the net profit margin.44
A 2015 report by McKinsey & Company found that across 366 public
companies in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Latin America, those in the top
quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns
above their respective national industry medians.45 And those in the top quartile
for ethnic and racial diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns
higher than that same median.46 A 2007 study by Catalyst found that Fortune
500 companies with at least three female directors have a 53 percent higher
return on equity and a 42 percent higher return on sales.47
These findings have been covered with “I told you so” satisfaction from not
just mainstream outlets, but women’s outlets specifically. The Muse, a career site
for women, wrote that “we’ve found the stats to prove once and for all why it’s
really worth hiring more women” in their coverage, headlined “The Cold, Hard
Proof That More Women Means Better Business.”48
The fact that so much of the media landscape has referred to these findings to
dictate women’s value says a lot about how our industry is ultimately framing
this conversation: capitalism.

Chapter Twelve
The Trouble with Capitalism

YOU CAN OFTEN RECOGNIZE feminist movements led by people of color by their
clear acknowledgment of how capitalism sidelines already marginalized groups.
Historically, feminism built by women of color was founded on the idea that
they would fight racism, classism, and embrace anti-capitalistic ideals. They
knew, intuitively as well as ideologically, that if you were operating from a lens of
money, you would inevitably leave a lot of people out.
Part of this thinking was intrinsic to Black feminism in its critique of slavery
—a component of capitalism that was both highly profitable to the United
States and, because of that profitability, was considered too valuable to eradicate
for centuries. Capitalism, a system in which a country’s industries are privately
owned and subject to private interests, prejudices, and biases in the name of
profits, was just as lethal as racism or sexism—in that it had the capacity to
incentivize racists and sexists.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in the introduction to her incredible oral
history How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective:
In all of their cases and perhaps thousands of others, these women had
come to revolutionary conclusions that their, and indeed all Black
people’s, oppression was rooted deeply in capitalism. This meant that the
narrow goals of simply reaching “equality” with men or with white people
were not enough…. They came to believe that Black liberation could not
actually be achieved within the confines of capitalist society.1
Behaving like men or obtaining what men have or achieving parity with men was
(and still is) not only shortsighted, it was deemed innately oppressive and
therefore not in line with Black feminism. After all, the machinations that make
what men have and how they historically operate—patriarchy—possible relies
on the exploitation of others. The oversight of economic interests as the
fundamental guiding principles of how our society has been constructed has had
devastating historical consequences.
For women specifically, this drive to generate profits has manifested in myriad
ways, but for Black American women, the slave trade is the most prominent
example. When the international slave trade began to shut down, slaveholders
began considering alternatives to maintaining a domestic population that had
proved crucial to the growing and lucrative cotton industry. To keep business
afloat, above humanity, “a premium was placed on the slave woman’s
reproductive capacity,” writes Angela Davis in Women, Race & Class.2 Fertile
enslaved women who had produced upward of ten children became an even
more specialized commodity—but it was the taste and sustenance of profits that
effectively divorced Black women from the “ideological exaltation of
motherhood—as popular as it was during the nineteenth century.”3
Where there was money to be had, Black women were not afforded a
conventional narrative of womanhood, which was part of a larger strategy to
dehumanize them for slaveholders:
… slave women were not mothers at all; they were simply instruments
guaranteeing the growth of the slave labor force. They were “breeders”—
animals, whose monetary value could be precisely calculated in terms of
their ability to multiply their numbers.
Since slave women were classified as “breeders” as opposed to
“mothers,” their infant children could be sold away from them like calves
from cows.4
It was this profits-based matrix that was critical to rendering Black women below
womanhood—or rather white womanhood—where motherhood was still
deemed a sacred bond, a dynamic that amply plays out today. Still, despite how
essential capitalism was to the continuation of slavery, Davis identifies how
during the Civil War, economic ignorance prohibited a deeper analysis of slavery,
specifically among those who were against it:
Even the most radical white abolitionists, basing their opposition to
slavery on moral and humanitarian grounds, failed to understand that the
rapidly developing capitalism of the North was also an oppressive system.
They viewed slavery as a detestable and inhumane institution, an archaic
transgression of justice. But they did not recognize that the white worker
in the North, his or her status as “free” laborer notwithstanding, was no
different from the enslaved “worker” in the South: both were victims of
economic exploitation.5
Davis elaborates that white abolitionists displayed little to no class allegiance in
this landscape or “directly defended the industrial capitalists.” Either way,
money and the drive to exploit others to make it was omitted from dominant
contemporary critiques of slavery. This “unquestioning acceptance of the
capitalist economic system” was adopted into nascent white women’s organizing
of the mid-eighteenth century, and established a limited framework within
which to view systemic social oppression:
If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish which needed to be
eliminated, most women’s righters viewed male supremacy in a similar
manner—as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society.
The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the
enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of
Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be
systemically related.6
Industrial feminists of the first wave, white and immigrant working-class women
who worked in American garment factories and laundries, also identified profits
and overt company influences as oppressive to their gender. Their extensive
union organizing, both before and after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 that
killed over 100 workers due to a common workplace policy that locked doors
and stairwells to prevent the workers from taking unauthorized breaks,
galvanized the rapid growth of the ILGWU, which was one of the largest labor
unions for the first part of the twentieth century.7 Their feminist platform was
centralized around workers’ rights: safe conditions, shorter hours, good wages,
access to education, the end of sex-based pay disparities, and more representation
within labor unions.
Orleck observes in Common Sense and a Little Fire that “[i]ndustrial
feminism posited a reciprocal relationship between economic and political
rights,”8 identifying the then hypothetical right to vote as part of a bigger
strategy to have more control over the quality of their lives as working-class
women. “The attraction of suffrage was simple: well-orchestrated use of the vote
promised to increase their power and independence in relation to employers, to
the state, and to their often-manipulative allies.”9 Under unchecked capitalism,
these women were deemed cheap labor and nothing more. And capitalism needs
cheap labor to perform optimally.
At a memorial service for those killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire
Schneiderman, a Polish Jewish immigrant who would go on to help lobby for
women’s right to vote and become a prominent union leader and socialist,
underscored the lack of regard for human life at the hands of profiteers:
This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every
week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every
year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap
and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters
little if 146 of us are burned to death.10
What Schneiderman identified was essential to the growing efforts to obtain
legal protections. This was a feminism that recognized how central low-income
and immigrant women were to business growth, and yet were treated as less than
the goods or services they provided. Their feminism was anchored there, in
having basic human rights, with legislative checks to ensure that they were
indeed treated as human rather than replaceable cogs that could be thrown out
or replaced in the event of damage.
But Schneiderman also popularized the notion that working-class women
deserved more than just the basics. She poetically espoused that they also have
the right to development, personal growth, and cultural access in her now-
immortalized “bread and roses” metaphor:
What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist—
the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and
music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right
to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.11
That immigrant and working-class women were innately entitled to the cultural
joys that had previously been reserved only for “the rich woman” was a deeply
radical concept, particularly for other white women who were starting to
organize. For middle- and upper-class white suffragettes who were also politically
assembling, this narrative of human rights and feminism did not quite align with
their own class-infused interests. Orleck observes that, “From its inception, the
working women’s suffrage movement spoke in a distinctly different voice from
that used by more affluent suffragists,”12 making arguments for broader human
rights versus fighting for access to what husbands and the patriarchy possessed.
This divergence was further manifested in how differently both groups
interpreted the right to vote and later the Equal Rights Amendment:
Professional women—who were, by and large, well educated,
economically comfortable, and native-born—had a different view of
sexual equality than did factory workers… professional and upper-class
women sought equal access to the power, money, and prestige that their
husbands and brothers wielded. Working-class women wanted to use the
vote to redistribute that power to the working-class as a whole.13
The capitalistic pursuit of “power, money, and prestige” would continue to
divide white feminism from more holistic forms of organizing, as was sharply
registered in the second wave by journalist and essayist Ellen Willis. In her piece
“Economic Reality and the Limits of Feminism” in the June 1973 issue of Ms.,
Willis recounts attending a meeting of a women’s group of “a dozen or so upper-
middle-class Midwestern housewives,”14 evidencing her growing concern that
the women’s movement was not at all prepared to reenvision the economic
landscape, a central component. She explains to the group that the same logic
used to relegate women to domestic work is often employed to keep women in
low-paying jobs: simply that work of this nature needs to be done to sustain
social functioning. She proposes a variety of different economic structures at the
meeting: people who perform these duties are paid more (rather than the
customary less), everyone trades off performing these tasks for a year, or to craft
hybrid work structures of “onerous” tasks as well as rewarding ones. Willis recalls
one woman who responds to the suggestion, “ ‘Frankly, if Women’s Liberation
means sacrificing what I have, I’m not interested.’” Willis continues by analyzing
this very revealing response across community lines:
The main difference between this woman and many who call themselves
feminists—or even radical feminists—is that she is candid about her self-
interest. More often, the same basic attitude is disguised with fancy radical
rhetoric like, “As a revolutionary I must organize around my own
oppression, not other people’s” and “All women are really working class.”
For several years now, feminists have been insisting that we want to
revolutionize the economy, not just integrate it. The present system—so
the argument goes—cannot accommodate our demands because it
requires cheap female labor in the marketplace and free female labor in the
home; the cost of abolishing sex-typed work, granting women equal pay,
and compensating domestic work and child care at their fair value would
be prohibitive. Besides, capitalism is its own specialized form of
patriarchy….15
Here, Willis distills a very particular, and often personalized, form of feminism
with singular interests—essentially white feminism. She draws this distinction
again by identifying an alternative, economically divergent feminism with
different goals, writing, “Many upper-middle-class women regard feminism as a
process of individual liberation and disdain ‘politics.’”16 And this particular
“individual liberation” has been a lush narrative within which to sell products,
experiences, and aspirations while also limiting our imaginations based on what
we can buy.
Through this scrutiny of capitalism, some Black feminists followed a through
line to a larger argument. If capitalism had effectively defined gender roles within
the drive to sell wares, then the practice had also arbitrarily constructed a
masculinity that undermined women. If gender is constructed by companies
who have to stay in the black, why engage with or consider their definitions of
what gender is? They just want to make money, ultimately revealing a shifting
ideology in that they will just go where profits are anyway.
Seeing people solely as profits and profits as people has had other sinister
consequences. Reducing people to resources has also systemically stifled
women’s ability to participate in virtually any other realm besides labor. Alice
Walker meditates on this premise in her pivotal 1974 essay for Ms. titled “In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the
South,” in which she reflects on how creativity for Black women was suppressed
for centuries to prioritize the economy of slavery.17 Mary Helen Washington
observes in response to the essay, “… Black women have been hidden artists—
creative geniuses in some cases—whose creative impulses have been denied and
thwarted in a society in which they have been valued only as a source of cheap
labor.” 18
This important dimension creates critical context for continued debates
about Black women’s visibility across fields of study and industries, as well as
their access to institutions, higher education, upward economic mobility, and
basics that get conflated into luxuries, like healthcare. This critical observation
also decimates the “pipeline defense”—the excuse I’ve heard countless
businesses, institutions, and colleagues use to justify hiring white, straight,
middle-class people over anyone else. The excuse being that there simply aren’t
enough Latinas with PhDs, enough Black women with journalism experience,
enough Muslim women with political backgrounds, enough Native women
with law degrees to hire when staffing for highly influential and prestigious roles.
That’s why we don’t see legions of women of color in film, in our newsrooms, in
our political landscape, in our art museums, teaching in our universities, in
publishing. It’s another way of shifting responsibility: See, it’s not our fault. They
just aren’t qualified or interested or driven or committed.
But this isn’t a defense—it’s a window into our business practices. Maybe if
women of color weren’t relegated to sweeping floors, caring for children, and
doing laundry for little to no money for centuries, we could have been
recognized as chemists, essayists, doctors, and artists. As having the potential to
make contributions to society and culture that will go beyond the ephemeral
need for more groceries, clean sinks, and fed children. But somebody who didn’t
cost very much had to wash dishes and pick cotton and produce and cook all the
food and then clean up after it. Sometimes this was white women. But most of
the time, it was and still is women of color. We are so seldom considered the
“creative geniuses” Washington describes because businesses don’t see us that
way. They see us as an affordable way to maintain their day-to-day functioning
—a practice that white feminism has directly inherited when strategizing their
own goals around perennial needs like childcare and domestic labor.
It’s the lack of attention to economics that facilitates this blindness, this
entirely straight-faced way of saying that the problem is as simple as we just
aren’t artists or academics or lawyers because we don’t want to be. It’s cheaper
and ultimately more profitable to just funnel us into maintaining the literal or
metaphoric plantation, because that’s what business has always done.
The fact that Lean In encouraged women to work more as an overarching
solution to being paid less, discriminated against, and stealthily fired for having
children effectively shirked responsibility for these injustices to women while
also scoring underpaid additional labor for these companies for which women
were leaning in. A major objective for white feminism is that power is
maintained as is, particularly where money is concerned.
A running critique, sometimes more acutely analyzed in some media
responses than others, was that Sandberg was ultimately advocating for
advancing within the patriarchal system rather than abolishing it—a decision
that struck journalists like Maureen Dowd, Melissa Gira Grant, and many others
(both on and offline) as more of a concession and ultimately not all that feminist
in its construction.
In her response to Lean In on the Feminist Wire in 2013,19 author,
professor, and activist bell hooks famously noted that the absence of structural
critique was very revealing:
Sandberg’s definition of feminism begins and ends with the notion that
it’s all about gender equality within the existing social system. From this
perspective, the structures of imperialist white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy need not be challenged…. No matter their standpoint, anyone
who advocates feminist politics needs to understand the work does not
end with the fight for equality of opportunity within the existing
patriarchal structure. We must understand that challenging and
dismantling patriarchy is at the core of contemporary feminist struggle—
this is essential and necessary if women and men are to be truly liberated
from outmoded sexist thinking and actions.20
Without taking into account the ways in which money has motivated
oppression, we are missing an essential layer as to why so many powerful and
influential entities, business owners, entrepreneurs, and moguls refuse to take on
social justice: it’s just not cost effective to do so. And this legacy has continued
and even adapted as some businesses have feigned a more populist message
regarding representation of women. Regardless of how many times they can say
“feminist!” in a product or ad, it’s the allegiance to money that has hindered
progress.
It was common knowledge at one prominent women’s brand I worked for
that the reason they didn’t have more women of color, specifically Black women,
on their legacy magazine covers was because they didn’t sell as well. For a
business enterprise, and a financially struggling one at that, the editorial strategy
to routinely flood the covers with normatively sized straight white women was
presented as necessary business, and not a deeply racist lens.
But this is where I’ve encountered capitalism to be at its most damaging: it
provides an all-encompassing language to code racism, heterosexism, and
classism as something else—to establish distance between these deeply coursing
prejudices and the unavoidable realities of running a business. This distance
insulates. It establishes an alternative reality in which testimonials, diversity
reports, investigations, and data analysis on representation don’t resonate
because making money is the ultimate objective above all else. But that’s all the
more reason why the impetus to drive profits also needs to be aligned and
analyzed in endeavors against oppression. Because the drive to make money,
more money, more money than your competitors, more money than you made
last year, more money than projected for the following year is an enduring
vehicle for suppression.

Chapter Thirteen
Muslim Money and Dyke Poverty

WE CAN’T SOLELY RELY on businesses to deliver the most marginalized out from
oppression. Mostly because not everyone can afford to be their customer.
A recurring perception of queer and lesbian-identified women in the United
States is that we don’t buy anything. Unlike our queer male counterparts, many
advertisers aren’t looking to court a lesbian customer base, as was reported in the
2016 BuzzFeed piece “Attention, Advertisers: Lesbians Buy Stuff, Too.”1
Reporter Lauren Strapagiel attributes this lack of broad corporate endorsement
to “stereotypes of lesbians as frumpy shut-ins who don’t care about nightlife or
fashion.” But the stereotypes are persisting, alongside growing reports that
lesbian bars are disappearing in the United States, and have been for the past
decade. Current data on this is sparse, which means speculation is high.
Intersecting theories range from accessibility of dating apps to gentrification to
queer women partnering up to stay home to expanding needs of queer spaces in
the first place, especially for those beyond the gender binary. But regardless of
what we ultimately learn about the demise or shift of physical businesses for
queer women, a crucial piece of data is that queer women don’t have any money
—not as a group.
Queer women (including lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women) are at
increased risk for economic insecurity when compared to the straight-identified
male and female population.2 Even when certain members of our community
are doing well financially, it’s certainly not indicative of broad-strokes changes. A
2014 Gallup poll concluded less than three out of ten LGBT women were
thriving financially compared to 39 percent of straight women. Queer women
are also more likely to be living in poverty than other queer people or straight
people (according to one report, nearly one in three bisexual women ages
eighteen to forty-four live in poverty, and one in five LGBT women living alone
live in poverty). Queer women of color, older queer women, and queer women
raising children are particularly vulnerable to these realities.
Coupling up or getting married doesn’t necessarily inoculate their finances
either. According to a 2015 report on money and LGBT women, “Women in
same-sex couples are more likely to be ‘working poor’ than men in same-sex
couples or men or women in opposite-sex married couples.”3
This data is all reflective of an elaborate patchwork of conscious and
unconscious discrimination: standard-gender wage gap, racism, xenophobia, and
a lack of federal employee protections for LGBTQ Americans, among others.
But for companies and corporations, this data simply translates as an insecure
customer base.
It’s not financially strategic to invest money into courting people who don’t
have a disposable income, and because so many exclusively queer spaces also
operate as businesses in a capitalist framework, it’s precarious to count on those
lower-income people as consistent customers—particularly to sustain an entire
business. As more Americans have come out and being queer has become less
and less stigmatized for certain individuals, that doesn’t directly mean that queer
women will have money to spend on cocktails and ladies’ nights. That’s because
our earning power is hindered by a slew of other institutionalized factors, and
our lack of ability to spend money the way that gay cis men do, the way that
straight cis women do, the way that straight couples do, doesn’t incentivize
businesses to consider marketing to us. And it’s because we are not desirable
customers that we have less power. Such is capitalism.
Even if you factor in queer-owned businesses, our power is slight. Forget
corporations. Of the 28 million small businesses in the United States, less than
one thousand were certified LGBT Business Enterprises4 in 2016, meaning that
the business was at least 51 percent owned or managed by a queer citizen.5 And
most of those businesses were owned by gay men. A mere 30 percent were
lesbian owned, while less than three percent were bi or trans owned,
respectively.6
Our lack of capital is one of the reasons behind why, in addition to so many
lesbian establishments shuttering, queer women’s digital spaces have shut down
too. When AfterEllen.com, considered “a staple of the queer-female online
community,”7 ceased regular publication in 2016, Strapagiel reported for
BuzzFeed News that the lack of advertisers attributed greatly to the website’s
demise. (AfterEllen.com would become a shell of its former self—publishing far
fewer articles a day and from non-staffed authors with no unified tonality or
voice.) Sarah Warn, the founder, told the publication that she was pursuing
advertisers for the brand in addition to other sites. Identifying customers was
key and queer men were preferred over queer women, despite the efforts of the
team: “The Logo [the company that owned AfterEllen.com until 2014] reps
consistently tried to sell to both gay men and lesbians, but advertisers almost
always only wanted to market their products to gay men.” Then editor in chief
Trish Bendix shared in a statement that the manager, Emrah Kovacoglu, of their
new parent company, Evolve, gave the news to her over the phone. “He said, ‘We
can’t find the money for the LGBT sites, we want to put our efforts into
growing the moms’ and fashion space where the money is.’ ” In a separate
statement, Kovacoglu also confirmed that they didn’t have “enough advertiser
support to justify continuing to invest at the same levels,”8 but clarified that the
site would remain accessible with content from “freelancers and contributors.”
The end of AfterEllen.com was mourned across the queer internet, as the
conversations and comments often mimicked the funereal narrative that now
laces around the shuttering of lesbian bars: I met my first girlfriend there. That’s
where I first started going after I came out. I loved it there. But where readers had
found community, affirmation, and a unified lens within which to share culture,
advertisers had failed to find customers, and it’s by that metric that
AfterEllen.com ceased to exist as it had.
These are the limits of the economic landscape as we have currently
envisioned them: if queer women don’t have any money, how are we supposed
to create “visibility”? How are we supposed to find each other? How do we
influence culture and politics without platforms of our own?
Some activists, both past and present, find the answers to these questions to
be severely limited by capitalism—and so they eschew it within their organizing.
They aren’t trying to shoehorn their beliefs into an economic platform that not
only disadvantages them from the start, but could also shift with wherever
business interests travel, leaving their tactics vulnerable.
Dyke March, a protest for queer women’s rights and visibility that began in
1993 in Washington, D.C., has rejected corporate sponsorship, even as queer
rights have become more corporate-endorsed through Pride parades. To this day,
Dyke March NYC doesn’t seek a permit to demonstrate because the march is
focused on disruption, rather than a parade.
“The Dyke March is about dykes,” Marlene Colburn, a “founding mother”
of Dyke March told me about the organization’s enduring decision to not seek
corporate sponsors. “It is about being visible in a society that seeks to erase us
and it’s being visible on our terms,” she elaborated, alluding to additional
politics, demands, or stipulations that often come with taking corporate money.
“I doubt that a corporate entity would want to sponsor us. And if one did we
would say ‘Fuck no. We don’t need or want your [money].’”
The original Dyke March in Washington, D.C., was organized by the New
York Lesbian Avengers in 1993. The team arranged for promotional materials
(approximately eight thousand fliers) and marshals to oversee the route all the
way to the White House. A reported twenty thousand self-identified “dykes”
showed up and continued to march to the National Mall. That same year, the
New York Lesbian Avengers organized the first NYC Dyke March, echoing
similar themes of grassroots assembling and affirmation of the First Amendment
right to protest. San Francisco and Atlanta also held their first Dyke Marches in
1993.9
That this terrain has endured for Dyke March is reflective of the queer
cultural environment in which the initial marches were organized. “The Dyke
March committee was formed before corporate sponsorships for Pride came into
being. But I don’t think we’ll be going down that road at any time,” Colburn
says. “We don’t monitor or police other Dyke Marches around the world (and
there are many), but I don’t think there are many, if any, of them sitting around
with their hands out begging for corporate sponsorship.” She clarifies that Dyke
March doesn’t identify directly as anti-capitalist, and the organizers do not
represent a unified social justice strategy. “I know that we come together so that
those who march feel safe, empowered, and enlightened every year,” she adds.
Dyke March accepts donations on their website and through “money honeys,”
marshal volunteers who collect money from participants in garbage bags or
pillowcases. So far, this method of fundraising has sustained Dyke March for
over twenty years in New York City, and there are as of this writing no strategies
to change.
But a lack of explicit corporate endorsement has proved to be a strength for
the protest,10 as marchers describe Dyke March as “inclusive”11 and more about
community rather than alcohol and money. This divide, understandably, plays
out very amply among queers who have money and those who don’t. Wealth has
proven to be a very stark divide in our community as some white cis queer men
manage to both get richer and achieve some semblance of cultural acceptance at
more or less the same rate. For the rest of us, wealth will continue to evade us, so
why should it be the benchmark for us having our rights protected? Being
visible? And being together?
Having attended many a Dyke March and a couple of Pride parades in New
York, the ripple effect to me has always been clear. When you remove purchasing
and brands as the rallying factor, more people can come. The lens is widened.
Evoking the powerful dynamics of radical queer history, Colburn says, “I
think accepting corporate sponsorships for protests is not the right thing for us.
The Stonewall Rebellion would not have come into being if they waited around
for corporations to kick in some [money] for glitz. They bought their own glitz
and so does the NYC Dyke March.”
This has the capacity to work the other way too. Even if you are deemed a
desirable customer by capitalist standards, that recognition can effectively flatten
communities and needs. Muslim-American women have experienced this with
the recent uptick in commercial representation, as brands like Nike, GAP,
Macy’s, and H&M have sought to “tap into the multibillion-dollar potential of
the U.S. Muslim consumer market,” according to The Intercept.12 Identifying
Muslim women as a lucrative customer base has incentivized these brands to
market and sell “modest clothing lines,” Ramadan capsule collections, hijabs—
and reach out to Muslim influencers to endorse them.
Rashmee Kumar reported in 2018 that having Muslim American women
represented in these national campaigns has the capacity to counter the more
Islamophobic and white supremacist messages that dictate their experiences and
their safety. Kumar wrote, “Consumer visibility can also signal a step toward the
inclusion of Muslims as American in politically hostile times, particularly for the
generation who grew up during the war on terror, when most representations
have cast Muslims as foreign terrorists and a threat to national security.”
“It’s incredibly validating on an individual level to Muslim women who wear
the scarf, who have to struggle with the comments and the vitriol and the
violence that they encounter every day,” said Sylvia Chan-Malik, an associate
professor at Rutgers University. “It’s almost a very practical sense of relief, like,
‘Oh, if this becomes more normalized, maybe I’ll feel more safe.’”13
Those threats to safety have been mounting. A 2014 survey of more than ten
thousand respondents concluded that of all faiths in the United States, Muslims
are viewed the most “coldly” by the American public.14 Reported assaults on
Muslim Americans rose “significantly” between 2015 and 2016, according to
Pew Research Center, notably exceeding their peak in 2001 following the
September 11th attacks.15 Through 2019, mosques in the United States
continued to be targeted for threats, arson, and graffiti.16 A feeling of protection
and security in increasingly hostile times toward Muslim Americans has value.
But it’s when this value becomes transactional—feel normal, buy this—that
the execution becomes fraught with other dynamics.
Consider how Shelina Janmohamed, vice president of Ogilvy Noor, a
Muslim division of a branding agency, distilled the young Muslim woman in
2016:
If I was to pick one person who represents the cutting edge of Muslim
Futurists, it would be a woman: educated, tech-savvy, worldly, intent on
defining her own future, brand loyal and conscious that her consumption
says something important about who she is and how she chooses to live
her life…. The consumers these brands are targeting are young, cool and
ready to spend their money…. The aspiration that Muslim Futurists hold
to lead a holistic Muslim lifestyle means that female Muslim consumers
are influential and have money to spend.17
The Muslim woman, as Janmohamed envisions her, has money—and that’s
what ultimately makes her appealing and, per Kumar’s reporting, engineers her
normalcy. This follows a white feminist logic: I have value because I have money.
And, reversely, it’s only those who have money who will achieve said value.
But a more important distinction here is that Janmohamed isn’t describing a
Muslim woman necessarily; she’s describing a Muslim consumer. And even
though those two identities will be easily conflated in advertisements and
promotional strategies, they are not the same thing.
Here are the differences. It’s true that some Muslim-identifying Americans
have financial security: as of 2017, about 24 percent have a household income of
$100,000 or more. But 40 percent make less than $30,000 a year and very few
occupy the financial space between.18 What this means is that many Muslim
Americans are existing on extreme opposites of the financial landscape, more so
than Americans overall.
But, not surprisingly, it’s those 24 percenters who are getting the visibility
from brands and, in some ways, that feeling of cultural security and protection.
And in a quest to obtain those customers, a narrow perception of one is being
perpetuated. Most Americans, according to national data, don’t know someone
who is Muslim,19 and yet the version they are encountering is being “collapsed
into an image of an over-filtered, hot, bourgeois, fair-skinned hijabi woman,
whose highlighter is ‘on fleek,’” observes Nesrine Malik in a 2018 piece for The
Guardian.20
Yet, she is just one of many Muslim women. There is no single ethnic origin
or racial majority for Muslim Americans. Over one-fifth are Black while others
self-identify across a range of both racial and linguistic categories from Middle-
Eastern, Arab, Persian/Iranian, and Asian, among other ethnicities.21 Telling too
is that just about as many Muslim-American women report wearing a hijab every
day as those who never wear it, with about 20 percent saying they wear one, but
not all the time.22 Yet, when it comes to marketing campaigns, Malik is right: the
female Muslim consumer is always identified by her hijab. She writes about how
ultimately reductive this image can be:
How are you to know that a woman is Muslim if she is not in a hijab?
How are you to package her? It’s just capitalism going through its
motions. Muslims wearing hijabs aren’t the bearers of some innate
authenticity. And while there are positive aspects to the way they are being
increasingly featured in the media, it can still be pointed out that this kind
of exposure can promote stereotypes, rather than eradicate them.23
It’s the machinations of business that tell us who and who is not Muslim by
manipulating this representation to suit customers—not necessarily
populations.
“[Companies] want the face, but they don’t want the complex politics or the
identity or the voice behind it,” Hoda Katebi, an Iranian-American fashion
blogger and activist, told The Intercept about her experiences fielding inquiries
from brands.24
Some of those “complex politics” include how brands like H&M and GAP25
exploit the labor forces in Muslim-majority countries with sweatshop
conditions. Long, unregulated hours, low pay, and gender-based violence have
been amply reported across the fast-fashion enterprises. A 2018 Global Labor
Justice report on factory conditions in H&M factories found that laborers, often
women, are held to such tight production quotas that they can’t even use the
bathroom or take breaks.26 There is little ventilation and drinking water in a
space with often-rising temperatures. Sexual harassment and assault are frequent
but seldom reported because these women innately know the avenues of
reporting such violence are not built for them—they are erected to protect the
company’s profits. And they barely make enough money to survive.
GAP did not respond to multiple requests for comment. An H&M
spokesperson told me in a statement, “All forms of abuse or harassment are
against everything that H&M group stands for.” She added, “This report clearly
showed the need of continuously addressing these issues. The empowerment of
women economically and socially is a way to prevent gender-based violence. Our
position is very clear and we actively support such a development within the
global textile industry. We do this by working to enable freedom of association,
strengthening workers’ voices and the right to join or form a trade union as well
as bargain collectively. These are fundamental rights of workers addressed within
our Global Framework Agreement with the global trade union IndustriALL. We
also address this through a number of projects in our productions countries
together with the ILO. We went through every section of the report and
followed-up on factory level with our local teams based in each production
country.”
“It hurts us to be paid so little,” Sakamma, a forty-two-year-old mother, said
in 2012 at a human rights tribunal in Bengaluru, India, about garment workers’
conditions in a GAP factory.27 “I have to do this and they sell one piece of
clothing for more than I get paid in a month. We cannot eat nutritious food. We
don’t have a good life, we live in pain for the rest of our life and die in pain.”
That “empowered woman” caricature quite literally stops at the flat
advertisement.
“There is little value in using visibly Muslim models if you are going to be
killing and exploiting—directly or indirectly—their families back home,” wrote
Katebi on her blog JooJoo Azad,28 which explicitly identifies as radical, anti-
capitalist, and intersectional.29 The “unapologetic” ethical fashion platform
includes a boycott list that cites brands like DKNY, Zara, Forever 21, and
Express.30 None of them responded to my repeated requests for comment.
Brands won’t save us because they aren’t designed to. They are designed to
seek and sustain profit.

Chapter Fourteen
Performing Feminism at a Desk

OFTENTIMES WHEN I’VE INTERVIEWED a successful business owner, an
entrepreneur, a CEO, a new head of an enterprise, the face of an organization,
they inevitably tell me over the course of our discussion, “We’re not perfect.” It
doesn’t matter whether I’ve asked about nonbinary inclusion in gender
campaigns or maternity leave accessibility. They all use the same line: “We’re not
perfect.” I’ve heard it so many times, in the same tenor, said to the same breath,
so much so that I can sense the phrase coming several sentences away and usually
hope they say they actually have a projected plan to implement they/them
pronouns by 2021 or that the six-month paid maternity leave policy is currently
being weighed by the board. But they usually don’t.
They just say, “We’re not perfect but…” But we support women! But we have
gay people who work here! But we have a state-of-the-art pumping room on the
third floor! There’s a lot more they could potentially say. I’ve been doing this
type of reporting long enough to understand this process is never a matter of
one person walking in implementing change. Multiple policies have to be
drafted. Senior-level people usually have to weigh them and then vote on them.
Sometimes they refuse them, or propose alternatives that are well beneath what
was originally proposed. Negotiations have to be scheduled. Then there have to
be negotiations to negotiations. Meanwhile, the people pushing for these
changes have all their daily job duties, children that need to be picked up,
doctor’s appointments, emergencies, aging parents, and homes that need to be
cleaned. You seldom get time off to write up a daycare cooperative with your
colleagues or form a union. The process for change through these avenues can be
slow and taxing. And sometimes, the people who are against change are relying
on it being that way. They want to tire you out. They are relying on you giving
up completely.
But my subjects don’t say this.
Instead, they say, “We’re not perfect,” which effectively reduces the purview
of what I asked about in the first place. Much like how “luck” both gives a nod
to having disproportional resources without acknowledging structural
advantages, I find “We’re not perfect” functions in much the same way.
There is an acknowledgment of the deficiency—the lack of women in
leadership positions, the fact that their board is composed of all cis men, that
their article features all white women. But the positioning of “perfect” aligns
gender parity, policies for parents to nurse their babies, trans people being able to
use bathrooms as lofty goals, when a lot of times what we are talking about are
basic human rights. “Perfect” casts protections for disability, for wage
protection, for pregnancy complications as distantly utopian. It packages the
reality of disenfranchised people being able to live day-to-day as somehow
idealistic. It switches around a question about critical need to an assertion of
luxury.
This seemingly diplomatic response has become commonplace in white
feminism—to deflect everything from why a “feminist”-identified company
doesn’t have a union to why most of the companies that are “pro-women”
actively discourage female employees from asking for raises. “We’re not perfect”
has proven to become an effective way to feign that internal work is indeed
happening when actually priorities are actively being drawn about what is
feasible based on fairly traditional systems of power. But it’s the priorities that
are changing—not those systems of power.
I see this tactic, this effort to preserve the status quo while appearing
progressive, most frequently when “change” is cloaked in tokenistic hiring
practices—à la change will come one woman at a time. Not only is “change”
being siloed in one individual, but I see that marginalized genders, people of
color, disabled people, queer people are being recruited for a circle of power
based on who mimics the oppressor best. Whether it’s how they exploit the
teams they manage, the way they affirm misconduct, or the way they erode
efforts to actually democratize decisions, power holders are often looking for
patterns they recognize rather than whatever registers to them as “different.”
Within the best version of this scenario, I see these hires challenging what
having that power even means in the first place. In the more typical scenario, I
see a young woman mandating that other young women work sixteen-hour days
for under-market value and with little job protection in the event that a parent
needs care or they have children or they have a health issue. Basically, white
feminism.
Sometimes this is achieved through illegal measures, but more often than
not, it’s achieved through company culture, in which boundaries are
compromised through a carefully curated culture of cool. Your boss is a
“friend,” your colleagues or people you manage are “like family.” Job
performance is determined more so by how likeable you are within this very
culture-specific social hierarchy rather than an up-to-date job description with
specific performance goals.
While I’ve seen this management style provide short-term comfort to
employees who are scarred from the cold, inhumane sterility of austere corporate
culture, the long-term benefits to the company are basically the same. Through
the manipulation of the term “family” and through the culture of “friends,”
even by the most well-intentioned manager, employees are conditioned to
sacrifice even more for company gain because a personal relationship is now
impacted by a company metric. The only slight variation is you have a young
woman upholding this time-honored infrastructure—and calling you “family”
while she does it.
But where I see “We’re not perfect” rhetoric and structures preserving power
through tokenized hires solidifying into one force is the assertion that this is
progress. That more women upholding policies that are anti-family, anti–
maternity leave, anti–wage protection, and anti-union is somehow radical when
it’s just the same old patriarchal practice with Instagram captions.
When I conduct these interviews with business owners or public figures, I get
the sense that I’m supposed to end the conversation believing that white
feminism is working very hard to undo white feminism. That more women in
these specific roles is just opaquely better, despite that the box, the way of
thinking, the way of organizing work and yielding profits is fundamentally the
same.
But if you remove this white feminist understanding of what gender equality
could look like and barriers like “We aren’t perfect,” so much is possible. We
aren’t just looking ahead at more people, broader issues, or parroting words like
“inclusivity,” “diversity,” “representation,” or “visibility” at one another. We are
looking ahead at an entirely different world.
To that end, white feminism isn’t just built on a foundation of white
supremacy, meritocracy, and money. It’s also erected by a fundamental lack of
imagination.
And you can always see that lack of ingenuity in the topics they deem most
urgent and the icons they rally around.
As mainstream women’s media decided to take up “feminist issues,” the one
topic I really saw the industry circle around as I was simultaneously coming up
was the wage gap—an issue that one of my bosses once glumly framed as
“homework.” At the time, traditional women’s media was just starting to make
this issue part of their regular editorial coverage. Propelled by the unadulterated
lens of women in corporate power, women with money—a lot of money—
became the explicit marker of feminism.
The aftereffects of Lean In produced a cultural imperative to cite feminism in
every female CEO. As is generally the case in business, there is often a bigger
demand than a supply. With only a sprinkling of top female CEOs to garner
clicks, a feminist packaging was hastily applied to the few who could be named
—regardless of whether they embraced feminism or outright disavowed it.
Shortly after terminating a work-from-home policy at Yahoo!,1 newly
appointed then CEO Marissa Mayer explained, “I don’t think that I would
consider myself a feminist. I think that, I certainly believe in equal rights. I
believe that women are just as capable, if not more so, in a lot of different
dimensions. But I don’t, I think, have sort of the militant drive and sort of the
chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that.”2
This scramble to apply a feminist lens, by any means, to female CEOs was
further afforded to now-disgraced founder and CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth
Holmes, in 2015 after a report from The Wall Street Journal raised questions
about the validity of her alleged revolutionary blood-testing company in which a
pinprick of blood could reveal a host of medical conditions.3 (It was later
reported that the science of this technology was never as finalized as Holmes
purported to investors and partners.) After receiving copious amounts of praise
from women’s media, the outlet I worked for included, for being the youngest
self-made female billionaire in the world, some journalists openly mourned
relinquishing a burgeoning so-called feminist (because she made a lot of money)
icon to alleged fraud.
Elle.com ran a piece titled “Before We Rush to Take Down Theranos’
Elizabeth Holmes….” that read:
… as someone who is ambitious and young and hungry, it costs me a lot to
give up Elizabeth Holmes. I don’t have better replacements for her….
Until the ratios even out, we need even our problematic examples of
success. Most of all, we need more women in these industries—not least so
that the media can compare trailblazers to someone who has two X
chromosomes. Not all brilliant women are the “female Steve Jobs.”
(Although, yes, it’s true that black turtlenecks look good on ambitious
ladies. Nora Ephron knew.) As the story develops, it seems less and less
plausible that Theranos will forever alter the course of Western medicine.
That’s okay. Holmes can be wrong. We can make her answer for that. But
we can’t let her become the latest proof that women should know better
than to go for it.4
Fear that Holmes would crystalize into a cautionary tale to young women about
choosing highly visible roles for fear that you might publicly screw up and be
misogynistically slandered on your way down was a hand-wringing that more or
less ceased once it was revealed, several years later, just how big of an alleged
scammer Holmes truly was. In the spring of 2018, it was reported that she had
raised “more than $700 million from investors through an elaborate, years-long
alleged fraud”5 in which she “exaggerated or made false statements about the
company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”6
But the empathic tone employed by Elle.com to swaddle a beloved white
feminist icon amidst accusations of mass bioethical fraud—which could
potentially endanger many, many lives—was white feminism playing out in real
time. That Holmes was afforded a cushy, apologetic life raft from women’s
media (and whichever female/feminist columnist mainstream outlets had
decided to dole this story out to) during her fall from grace underscored the
perks of white feminism, but also revealed how much of the media landscape
had anchored their gender coverage there. What was being presented as “gender
coverage” was actually white feminism.
In 2018, after Holmes’s alleged crimes had been fully reported by the
Securities and Exchange Commission, the Washington Post still managed to
lament a fallen “unicorn”:
Yet despite the gravity of the allegations, many women, myself among
them, still felt a frisson of disappointment.
Why? In the words of one female friend, “I’m sad that our one Steve
Jobs is a fraud.” In other words: There goes our unicorn.7
The Feminist Lady CEO media hunt and Lean In set into motion a moving
formula that now resounds so loudly over Pinterest and Instagram that it’s hard
to believe it wasn’t always there: that building a business as a woman is an innate
feminist undertaking.
The rise of the Instagram influencer has, in some ways, democratized fame—
no longer reserved for traditional entertainers. Now, any entrepreneur, small
business owner, or fashion blogger can build a prominent, active following that
can rival that of actors and singers, vocations that historically came with a
pulsating populace to drive their influence. This metric can be applied to and
assessed by many professions, industries, and superstars of any ilk, and the need
to have a “face” of a brand has extended well beyond literal and tangible
products like soap or makeup or ketchup. Now, businesses as entities need to
have a social media narrative and story, preferably embodied by a single person or
couple or family, to resonate.
If we kick it back though, marketing and advertising has always had to build
an engaging narrative to sell wares—no one will like you if you don’t have this
balm, no woman will give you the time of day unless you buy this car, you will
not be a proper wife unless you clean with this soap. Commercials and print
advertisements have built on this concept through strategic copy, particular
graphics, and extensive campaigns.
So Instagram—as roaming, constantly updating life ads—is just a Black
Mirror evolution of this same concept. “You can be cool like me if you tap to see
the brands in this photo,” “Your kids can be cute like mine if you consider
buying these rompers,” “It’s #DateNight, so naturally I’m wearing this INSERT
BRAND HERE lipstick.” Each curated or sponsored photo builds on this
narrative of personal branding—“I’m a mom just like you,” “I’m a #bossbitch,”
“I’m a cool girl.” But just like the Photoshop everyone was hand-wringing about
when I was a teenager, little of this performativity is authentic where there are
products to shill and personas to build. Concerns about kids and Photoshop
seem quaint compared to kids consuming illimitable hours and hours of
Instagram #nomakeup ads and thinking they are real.
Where this strategy extends to some feminist-branded entrepreneurship is
that building savvy businesses requires one of these narratives too. As feminism
or #feminism has become acceptable and even flashy in pop culture, it’s been
easy or “timely” to cast yourself or your business in a deeply feminist personal
narrative, picture by picture. Feminism is just a part of standard, personal brand
building.

Feminism lives prominently on Instagram with over nine million posts

tagged, a combination of memes, quotes, and art—an image-based international
conversation about gender equality in real time. But within this digital tapestry
of quotes from Frida Kahlo,8 images of “I Believe Survivors” pins,9 and photos
of “all-gender” restrooms10 are images, metrics, and quotes from women in
business. You’ll find a quote credited to Melinda Gates, “a woman with a voice
is, by definition, a strong woman,”11 an illustration of the number of female
CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (it’s twenty-four),12 and an uncredited quote
saying, “Be the woman who fixes another woman’s crown without telling the
world it was crooked.”
This visual fusion of corporate ascension and women’s rights is emblematic
of how this conversation has merged nationally, where you see iconic Audre
Lorde quotes13 alongside images of female celebrities protesting14 and Celine
ads15 and it’s all somehow branded as #feminism. What’s even more concerning
is the way these principles, radical feminist ethos, and capitalistic ambition have
visually fused over millennial pastels to form their own branded fourth-wave
white feminism: Audre Lorde quotes superimposed on an image of a woman of
color in a business suit climbing the metaphoric career steps to the top,16 or a
Lorde quote used in an Instagram posting/ad for handmade lingerie.17
What makes this merging even more curious, in addition to being just jaw-
droppingly inaccurate, is that Lorde founded her career and feminist legacy on
critiques of capitalism. In “Uses of the Erotic,” reprinted in Your Silence Will
Not Protect You, Lorde observes the machinations to which her cherry-picked
quotes are now cemented online:
The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of
profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need
to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—
the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic
value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system
reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or
oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to
blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy
the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly
cruel.18
The space between feminism and business-building has been further eradicated
with the hashtag #fempreneur, a space of over seven hundred thousand (and
counting) posts that scale a tonality of ambition-fostering, social media strategy,
and a sustained glorifying of busy. The recurring imagery of women of varying
races (but mostly white) at laptops and desks, smiling with well-placed caffeine-
jacked coffees and efficient, yet pretty to-do lists messages again and again that
distilled female productivity—a capitalistic metric—is an intrinsically
patriarchy-smashing activity.
Feminism is being a white-collar woman with an inventive braid in an office.
Feminism is having a smartphone that you check a lot of email on while you
smile. And most importantly, feminism is personable and nice-looking and
young.
Their white feminist foremothers, American suffragettes, used this strategy
too. In streamlining and directly managing what the suffragette looked like, they
assured Americans that women who wanted the vote were “likeable, charismatic,
virtuous, and professional,” according to author Margaret Finnegan.19 Through
the manipulation of optics, they created a homogenous-looking movement for
women’s rights. And as I’ve watched this pattern play out now, while I see some
variation on race, but very little on body type, age, or gender presentation, it’s
the ethos that is aggressively uniform in these representations: feminists are
always happily working in offices.
The control that some suffragists exercised then now exists as a homogenized
devotion to office or entrepreneurial labor, reflecting what has become
increasingly aligned with whiteness, beauty, youth, and thin bodies:
unquestioned devotion to your company, corporation, or employer. Or, as it is
more chirpily quantified, “ambition.”
But the mass proliferation of “hustle porn” or “hustle inspo,” as it is
sometimes called, in which we are constantly looking at women performing
feminism at a desk, also accomplishes something far more ominous. You can tell
how much the mantra of self-obsessed ambition has colored popular
conversations on women’s rights as the “unambitious,” people who don’t even
have a desk, or a laptop, or an email inbox, or to-do list, must elbow for visual
representation or coverage in this “ambition”-laced landscape. A lot of the time,
these are people and groups who aren’t looking for power, necessarily; they want
rights—but in white feminism, these two have become inextricable.
It’s within this coupling that women’s productivity and business-building is
framed as the course of action that will free you from gender oppression.
This approach to gender equality has also reinterpreted political
demonstration.
International Women’s Day, observed and initiated by female socialists in the
United States and Russia shortly after the turn of the century, was later adopted
by the United Nations in 1975 to commemorate women’s rights and world
peace.20 But thanks to the warping of white feminism, it’s become an
international day of lady-product pushing—a day in which promoting and
selling women-centric items with a portion of sales dedicated to gendered causes
is the template for celebrating.
British Vogue boasts the “ultimate empowering picks to shop now”21 while
Elite Daily says, “These International Women’s Day Beauty Products Will Let
You Shop for Progress.”22
These product guides—standard fare in women’s media—solidify this notion
that you can be politically active, particularly for women’s rights, by buying.
That money, capital, the exchange of currency are avenues to revolutionary and
sociopolitical change. And that purchasing a limited-edition “March On” red
lipstick from Elizabeth Arden is political engagement.23
Instead of a protest vehicle, feminism became a brand.
Business ventures of today are still coded with this ideological thrust. When
People covered Sofia Vergara’s #EmpoweredByBusiness campaign, it was
reported that “[t]he initiative will shed light on how motivating women in the
world of business can improve—even revolutionize—their lives.”24
To “revolutionize” your life through business once again merges the
radicalism of feminism with the corporate, women-oppressing language of
capitalism. If you threw a millennial-pink lens over this saying, you could put it
on Pinterest.
That so many of these pins and images depict a woman alone at her
computer or desk or enterprise is also very significant in that they are once again
speaking to an individualistic understanding of feminism: your singular success
is feminist. Your ability to run this business is feminist. Or, at the very least,
feminist-branded.
The Myth of the “Girl Boss”
If business, corporate labor, and money were the three pillars by which we were
culturally metabolizing feminism, then female CEOs would be the storytellers.
This framework was very efficient in reframing women of this standing as
feminists, even if they didn’t use the word or directly identify that way, in that
gendered experiences were nevertheless identified in mainstream discourse.
Through these personal accounts, these female CEOs were conveying direct
encounters with sexist structures, institutions, and workplaces. But the
limitation of these narratives is that the window to recognize sexism stopped
there, at a personal threshold, and often neglected higher structural analysis.
That’s because white feminism’s allegiance is ultimately to power as is—there
isn’t supposed to be a reevaluation of that framework within this approach to
gender equality.
The end goal was often not structural change, but personalized solutions—
namely personalized solutions you could buy through them and their brand:
products, services, or books. Much like the empowerment conferences, some
women’s-only clubs, and feminist-branded apparel discussed in previous
chapters, sexism had to have individual solutions that could be purchased.
Thinx underwear founder Miki Agrawal conveyed to The Cut that she saw
Thinx underwear, specifically designed for customers on their period, as part of a
larger effort to combat patriarchal rule:
But Agrawal, like many in the tech and business worlds, believes that all
this overwhelming awfulness can be gradually fixed—without sacrificing
profit. “I would not be able to be super-jacked about a product that’s just
a product,” she explained. “I need to feel like there’s a great cause.”25
The “great cause” included tapping into broader social justice critiques and
issues to give Thinx underwear both feminist credibility but also an engaging
product story:
The idea, in a reductive nutshell, is that menstruation is a wholly natural
part of life for anyone born a woman, and feeling obligated to hide the
smells and the stains and the cramps is as symptomatic of the patriarchy as
unequal pay and sexual harassment. And there’s a little fun to be had in
the shock value of it, too: the modern day equivalent of bra burning.
Thinx is unapologetically riding this tide of period feminism, to great
success. The company sends out a weekly newsletter called “This Week in
Feminism,” with subject lines like “On Thursdays We Wear Feminism” (a
reference to a line from the movie Mean Girls), and “Season’s Bleedings”
and “Fa-la-la-la-la-la-va-gi-na,” for the holidays.[26] Interspersed with
hashtags like #periodproud, there are links to stories about voting rights
for women in Saudi Arabia and sexual assault in the United States and
updates on anti-abortion legislation, on Emma Watson’s feminist book
club,[27] and on the State of the Union. (“Who else remembers Shania’s
hit single “Man! I Feel Like A Woman (Because I Am Being Ignored
Again)”???) There are inspirational lines like “When life hands you
lemons, you squeeze them into the eyes of the patriarchy.”28
Aligning your product with the revolution, or rather, branding it as part of a
grandiose plot to overthrow the patriarchy, is essential to white feminism
because commerce often has to go hand in hand with gender parity or
empowerment. This was further evidenced by Agrawal telling the outlet, “I only
started relating to being a feminist, literally, right when I started my company,”29
a revealing window into the origin of her gender politics. She started identifying
as a feminist when she needed to sell us something.

GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso, then CEO of clothing company Nasty

Gal, was also depicted as having personal strategies to sexism but “for those
young women who may be turned off by Sandberg’s corporate image,”
according to a 2014 review of the book by Business Insider.30 “Unlike Sandberg,
Amoruso doesn’t have degrees from elite schools and a resume that lists Google
and Facebook. Instead, she had to finish high school by home schooling due to
ADD and a lack of interest.” It’s within this less class-sanctioned avenue to
business success that reportedly “Amoruso provides an alternative. Her feminism
is rooted in the rebelliousness of punk rock but with all the seriousness of a
CEO.”
In her book, Amoruso herself mentioned the classist condescension with
which her lack of higher education was often cited, writing:
I’m not going to lie—it’s insulting to be praised for being a woman with
no college degree. But then, I’m aware that this is also to my advantage: I
can show up to a meeting and blow people away just by being my street-
educated self.31
The interpretation that Amoruso was somehow not “corporate,” while
reportedly running a $100 million business32 that same year, underscores how
distorted this particular depiction of women and wealth was. Amoruso may not
have possessed the identical “corporate image” that Sandberg exuded, but she
was nevertheless an extremely powerful, lucrative, and corporate figure. The
media assertion, though, was efficient in establishing a narrow spectrum by
which to assess, identify, and examine feminism: wealth.
Using that lens to locate or inaugurate feminist exploration brought us an
equally narrow script within which to understand and interpret feminism:
company-building, company growth, and money. If the rare roster of female
CEOs was going to be the mainstream cultural window into achieving gender
equality, that served to align feminism with what is the key objective for any
CEO: money.
This is how the unabashedly profit-seeking woman came to embody fourth-
wave white feminism and how money in the hands of a female-identified person
came to represent an innately “feminist” narrative, regardless of how that money
was procured, how that money was used, or what that money was sustaining.
Wealth building, simply for the sake of wealth building, was presented as a white
feminist goal.
Exporting this idea to readers, customers, and followers also continued the
script that professional advice could be rebranded as “feminist” or hybrid
feminist. The objective was all about making money for both yourself and the
company you either worked for or founded, entities that at times merged over
inspirational quotes and sound bites from female entrepreneurs about building
their companies. This also coalesced with the heightened understanding (from
readers as well as the subjects themselves) that they were walking, talking brands.
Talking about your business ventures, or yourself, was packaged as more or less
the same. This is part of a larger goal that modern white feminism has always
possessed: to merge political and commercial identities. These women were the
brand, and therefore the politics, any time they gave a sit-down interview or were
profiled.
And the media was very interested in covering them and any woman who
resembled them. The global press coverage of female entrepreneurship was
noted by the Harvard Business Review in 2013 as having jumped dramatically in
two years (between 2009 and 2011).33 The following year, the United Nations
formally recognized the first Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, “meant to
celebrate women entrepreneurs worldwide and to mobilize a global network of
female business owners, entrepreneurs and change makers who support and
empower this community of women entrepreneurs and their businesses,” Forbes
reported in 2014.34 At the first inaugural event celebrating Women’s
Entrepreneurship Day in New York City, Forbes separately reported that the day
“brought together a group of activists, philanthropists, corporate leaders, civil
society and nonprofit executives to support the growth in businesses owned by
women around the world.”35 This assembly further collapsed any barriers
between social activists or philanthropists and corporate executives or business
owners—Women’s Entrepreneurship Day sent the distinct message that they
were the same thing, and with the same if not overlapping goals.
When #GIRLBOSS was published in 2014, it became a New York Times
bestseller and, later, a Netflix series by the same name. New York magazine
described the book as “a millennial alternative to Lean In”36 and Lena Dunham
elevated the brand even further, saying “#GIRLBOSS is a movement.”37
Importantly, though, the “business book,” as it was awarded by Goodreads,38
wasn’t considered a structural critique by any measure. Even the “accessible”
career advice, according to the New York Times, was at times “head-
scratching.”39 The Guardian said, “This bestseller is both the life story of a
fashion entrepreneur and a guide to female empowerment. The trouble is it’s as
shallow as a teaspoon.”40 The reviewer ultimately described the “sensible advice”
as “thin” when considering how a reader was supposed to replicate these
strategies.
But this interpretation of #GIRLBOSS was not lost in some online women’s
spaces, in which the book was evaluated to have other merits well outside of
structural change. Tori Telfer observed in Bustle in 2014:
A book like #GIRLBOSS is valuable in that it inspires young women,
especially young women feeling under confident or unsure of how to
carry themselves in the workplace. But it’s ultimately a bit shallow; it’s a
memoir with some pretty basic workplace advice stirred in. This advice—
don’t let men hold you back, work hard for what you want—isn’t really
what young workers need to hear. Millennials ostensibly already know
that we should work hard and push for equality and wear professional
clothing to an interview, and if we don’t, that’s a different problem
entirely. What #GIRLBOSS provides—what Lean In provided—is
psychological support, not answers. Change in the workplace ultimately
happens with change in the workplace: You gotta go to the interview
before you can get the job. You gotta work at the job before you get the
promotion. If there’s another way around this corporate ladder, neither
Sandberg nor Amoruso are telling young women about it.41
“Psychological support” marketed as “a movement” is key for white feminism,
though, in that institutions and conventions are ultimately not challenged, even
when the rhetoric of radical change is employed and the subjects are presented as
counter to mainstream, like in the case of Amoruso, possessing “the
rebelliousness of punk rock.”
What’s often being asserted in these windows to corporate female power is
that these women are simply radical for possessing what men have always had or
operating as corporate men do. As Noreen Malone observed about Thinx
founder Agrawal in The Cut:
If Agrawal were a man, her type would be immediately recognizable: She
meditates with the app Headspace, she does Crossfit, she has given a
TEDx talk,[42] she quotes Steve Jobs and Tim Ferriss. She is self-
mythologizing, utterly confident even in situations where she has no good
reason to be, and it all serves her exceedingly well. She is a tech bro—
except she’s a woman, trying to sell underwear. Or, as she sees it,
innovating in the “period space.”43
The New Yorker made a similar, but more subtle observation, about then CEO
of Theranos, Holmes, in 2014 when reporting on how her all-male board (with
the exception of her) interpreted the company being led by a young woman. A
quote from Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state and Theranos board
member, showcased just how rare it was for this powerful male cohort—which
included Bill Frist, a former Senate Republican majority leader; Sam Nunn, a
former Democratic senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee;
William J. Perry, the former secretary of defense; and Richard Kovacevich, a
former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo—to be confronted with so young and
female a leader:
Kissinger, who is ninety-one, told me that Holmes “has a sort of ethereal
quality—that is to say, she looks like nineteen. And you say to yourself,
‘How is she ever going to run this?’ ” She does so, he said, “by intellectual
dominance; she knows the subject.”44
The tonal implication to the reader is that a woman who is thirty but “looks
nineteen” raises fundamental questions about leadership capacity. But
Kissinger’s insistence that Holmes ultimately knows her field is presented as an
accomplishment in spite of how she presents. Her “intellectual dominance” is
presented as antithetical to her “ethereal quality,” suggesting that she is an
anomalous and revolutionary combination.
This lens was also applied to a 2014 Fortune profile of Holmes, titled “This
CEO Is Out for Blood,” pairing the same elements described by Kissinger, both
a soft, Renaissance-reminiscent portrait of Holmes, softly lighting her blond
hair, fair skin, and rosy mouth, with the direct ruthlessness of the headline:
demure beauty and a CEO’s drive. Holmes’s Stanford engineering professor
summarizes the lofty dreams of the teenage sophomore as being charged with a
desire to “revolutionize”:
Still, he balked at seeing her start a company before finishing her degree. “I
said, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ And she said, ‘Because systems like
this could completely revolutionize how effective health care is
delivered…’”45
That gender was often identified as the singular basis for this radicalism—being
highly corporate while female—was also crucial, as it mirrored white feminism’s
sole focus on gender oppression without any class, race, heterosexist, or other
important contexts.
But excelling in corporate America as the flimsy basis for feminism would
later fall apart when their practices, policies, and protection of powerful systems
would eventually come out.
In 2015, after Inc.com reported that 2014 was “a Banner Year for Nasty Gal’s
‘Girl Boss,’”46 Amoruso’s company was sued by a former employee. According
to the lawsuit, which was first reported by Anna Merlan at Jezebel,47 Nasty Gal
had “fir[ed] four pregnant women… as well as one man about to take paternity
leave.” The lawsuit stipulated that Nasty Gal “systematically and illegally”
terminated pregnant employees, which was in violation of California state law.
Merlan reported that the suit was filed by former employee Aimee
Concepcion, deemed a star worker, according to company reviews. But she
alleged that her pregnancy changed her standing in the company. Upon
notifying her manager about her pregnancy, Concepcion described her manager
as “shocked” and “not pleased.” Then she was told that the company didn’t need
to offer her maternity leave since she had only been with the company nine
months.
Both the California Family Rights Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act
provide twelve weeks of unpaid leave only if the employee has been with the
company more than a year (and under FMLA, only if the company has fifty or
more employees). But a state protection still ensured that what Nasty Gal was
accused of was illegal. Another law, California’s Pregnancy Disability Leave,
mandated that any employer who provides health insurance also has to provide
up to four months of pregnancy disability leave, regardless of how long they
have been with the company.
Concepcion said in her lawsuit that Nasty Gal had confirmed that they were
hiring a replacement for her role. But in August of that year, she was told she was
being fired for budgetary reasons unrelated to her performance. Then, she
alleged, they held her health insurance hostage:
Concepcion’s suit says the company tried to force her to sign a severance
agreement waiving her right to sue them. At first, she alleges, they
promised she’d continue to be paid through her due date and given
healthcare coverage through December 2014, then said it was conditional
upon her signing the agreement. Concepcion gave birth to her daughter in
November, but says Nasty Gal never registered her for COBRA coverage,
meaning she was uninsured.48
Concepcion’s termination demonstrated a pattern of targeting parents for firing,
according to her suit:
Besides her, Concepcion alleges that in August 2014, during one of the
bouts of layoffs, many of the people let go were either pregnant, on
maternity leave, or about to take it. One of them, according to the
complaint, supposedly found out she was being fired at 36 weeks
pregnant, just before a planned baby shower her coworkers were throwing
her. Another, Anne Coelen, was fired due to “restructuring” just before
returning from maternity leave. The suit says Coelen was replaced by two
male employees. The suit says Gilberto Murillo, who was scheduled to
take paternity leave in October to be with his pregnant wife, was also
terminated in August. A month after the August layoffs, Rosa Lieberberg,
then twelve weeks pregnant, was also allegedly fired, although not because
of “restructuring”—the complaint says she was accused of being part of “a
mean girls club.”49
The case went to arbitration and Concepcion dismissed her suit under
confidential terms.50
Two years later, Racked reported the “feminist” period underwear brand
Thinx was allegedly rife with abusive management, subpar maternity leave, and
mistreatment of staff. In the 2017 Vox report, headlined “Thinx Promised a
Feminist Utopia to Everyone But Its Employees,” Hilary George-Parkin wrote
that CEO and founder Miki Agrawal “has carefully crafted her own image as a
taboo-busting evangelist for women’s rights and the reigning queen of feminine
hygiene.”51 Yet, according to employees, that image contrasted deeply with the
internal infrastructure and culture of the company, in which salary negotiations,
terminations, and management failed to reflect a basic respect for staff.
“Feminist” branded or not, the company reportedly mimicked the exploitative
dynamics that has traditionally made explosive capitalistic success possible:
“It honestly felt like a middle school environment: pitting people against
each other, calling us petty children and [saying that we were] immature
and that we’re all these millennials that don’t know anything—meanwhile
we’re being paid easily $30,000 under industry standard salaries,” says one
former employee. “It was truly like being in an abusive relationship. And I
don’t use that analogy lightly…”
… Though several sources say they either took a pay cut or accepted a
below-market-rate salary because they wanted to work for the company,
attempts to negotiate for higher pay after being given more responsibilities
or a change in title were dismissed as ungrateful or told salaries were non-
negotiable.
“Whenever anybody would try to negotiate with her, [Agrawal] would
go back to the fact that we’re young, and just be like, ‘Oh, you’re in your
20s. You don’t need a lot of money,’” says one former employee.
She treated it “as if it were selfish to take a salary representative of your
worth,” says another. While yearly raises were given based on performance
and revenue, the dollar amount was considered non-negotiable, and, says a
third source, the only employees who the source ever knew to have
successfully argued for additional money were two of the few white men
who worked at the company.52
Cost-cutting measures also put the health and well-being of the staff directly at
odds with the “feminist” messaging that dictated their workplace:
In March of 2016, the team called a meeting with Agrawal to bring
forward some of their grievances with the company, sources say, one of
which was an abrupt email they received alerting them to a reduction in
paid vacation days from 21 to 14 per year, as well as the prohibitively
expensive healthcare packages the company offered (a $200 per month
premium for the cheapest option at the time, according to one source).
“I remember one of my coworkers started crying,” said another source,
whose recollection of the meeting was confirmed with two other
employees present at the time. “She said, you know, ‘I love working here. I
love working for women. But it hurts to know that I’m giving my whole
life to Thinx basically, like I work all the time, but I can’t even afford birth
control. And what does that mean if we’re at a feminist company and I
can’t afford to keep myself safe and protected?’”53
The Vox reporting noted that the former and current employees routinely
referred to one another as “family” in what reads like trauma bonding when
confronted with an “erratic” CEO who tried to maintain control through
manipulative methods:
On at least one occasion, says a source, she’s said to employees, “We’re
going to hire immigrants who are grateful” to work at the company, and
made “uncomfortable” comments about employees’ bodies.54
Those “comments” were further reported by New York magazine as
unwanted comments and touching by a woman much more powerful than
themselves:
[Chelsea] Leibow, who was fired in December after months of voicing
concerns about Agrawal’s behavior, had started a year before and been
promoted midyear. At first, the company culture seemed refreshingly
“open and honest,” she said to me over the phone. A month or two after
her arrival, however, Agrawal said she had an “obsession” with Leibow’s
breasts, and “helped herself,” as Leibow put it to me last week. “I didn’t
say anything to her at the time. If you’ve ever been touched without your
consent, you know it’s jarring. The whole atmosphere was one of: this is
fine, this isn’t a big deal.” (In the formal language of the complaint, it was
Agrawal’s “generally aggressive and retaliatory demeanor, position of
authority, and style of management” that made Leibow too intimidated
to speak up.) Leibow said that Thinx’s office setup—in a co-working space
at the Centre for Social Innovation—meant it wasn’t only her own co-
workers who could see it happen, adding to her embarrassment. And yet,
though other employees confirm that they saw their boss touching an
employee’s breasts, no one stopped Agrawal or complained to her about
it. “If someone had gone to her to complain,” another employee
explained, “she would have held a grudge, and work becomes ten times
harder when she does.”55
Leibow elaborated that this touching solidified into a “pattern,” in which
Agrawal continued to make comments about her breasts in various outfits, and
those of other employees, and touched her when they were alone as well as in
front of other employees. In recounting the alleged abuse, she made an
important distinction when describing the sexual harassment to the magazine:
“I felt that Miki objectified my body when she declared that she was
‘obsessed’ with it and made very detailed comments about my breasts, and
it also seemed like a way for Miki to assert her dominance over female
employees by simply doing whatever she wanted to do without asking,
and showing she could get away with it.”56
This exertion of power also reportedly manifested in changing clothes in front of
other employees, taking business calls on the toilet, FaceTiming with employees
while partially clothed, openly describing her lesbian-identified assistant as
“hot,” and sharing explicit details of her sex life. The brand identity collided
with these abuse claims in moments where Agrawal’s seniority overrode personal
boundaries of the team:
At an all-female underwear company with a casual office culture, nudity
was perhaps not as shocking as it might have been in other work
environments, but according to employees it was paired with a sexual
aggressiveness that was disturbing. At one meeting in December 2015 just
before the holidays, while staff ate cake, Agrawal launched a discussion of
polyamory. She said she had an interest in it, and was considering trying it.
She then pointed to employees individually and asked if they, themselves,
had ever tried it. “The power dynamic was such that people wouldn’t feel
comfortable saying they didn’t want to be asked that,” explained one
person present.57
Agrawal told CNBC that the sexual harassment allegations were “baseless” and
with absolutely no merit.58 When she stepped down as CEO in 2017, Thinx
told Business Insider:
Miki Agrawal is no longer CEO, and we are working to put new
leadership and policies in place so we can continue to grow and thrive. To
support this effort we have hired an executive search firm to assist in the
recruitment of a new CEO. We are also hiring a human resources
executive and, in the interim, have engaged a human resources
professional who is working in our offices to support our progress.
Related to Ms. Leibow’s allegations, THINX has not been served with
a legal complaint or charge from any agency. When the issues were
brought to our attention following Ms. Leibow’s departure from
THINX, the company commissioned an investigation that concluded the
allegations had no legal merit. The company cannot comment further on
these legal matters.59
ln addition to denying the allegations, Agrawal wrote on Medium that she
had made “a TON of mistakes,” but contrasted these uncited errors with the
marked expansion of her company. Her focus on “growth” as a CEO ultimately
meant “tough calls” in other parts of the business, she said:
When I started, like any entrepreneur, I was fighting for the life of the
company, the clock was against us and I needed to make sure that we
didn’t close our doors after 1 year like 60%+ of businesses do. I wanted to
make sure my employees got a continuous paycheck and our shareholders
saw growth. I was deeply focused on top and bottom line growth and on
our mission to break the taboo. And under my leadership, we did it. We
got out of the red, we never missed payroll, and we made a name for
ourselves in a really tough, taboo category. THINX was on the map.
Then, things grew and they grew fast. Hockey stick growth fast.
Beyond my wildest dreams fast. Like any Co-Founder/CEO, all I did was
the best I could under these crazy circumstances.60
Agrawal’s attempt to reframe allegations of sexual harassment and mistreatment
around profits, growth, and capital building reveals how her objectives as a CEO
don’t necessarily align with human rights. The telltale language of white
feminism peppers the post, merging business-building with feminism—words
that you’d find in aspirational business memes on Instagram and Pinterest like
“innovation,” “dreams,” “#startuplife,” “blessed,” “learn and grow,” and
“movement.” Her repeated assertion that she grew the company, and that said
goal is representative of true success over the alleged denigration of her
employees, exhibits where her “feminism” operates from: money. In 2016,
Agrawal wrote another Medium post titled “An Open Letter to Respectfully
Quit Telling Me How to ‘Do Feminism’ (and to just support one another,
please!),” essentially asking that “women in media” stop interrogating her
feminism. She wrote a year before the workplace allegations surfaced:
Yes, feminism is an integral part of our brand strategy-but no, it’s not
happening in a focus group room, and it’s not been decided by a Board.
The notion of feminism as a part of THINX was an organic realization—
a perfect fit—because it’s what we exist to do. Each and every word and
image used in our communications and our campaigns is thought up and
created by our team of young badass feminists (all of whom also have their
own interpretations of the term). Integrating feminism into our
marketing is not a ploy, and it is not exploitative; it’s reclamation of how
brands treat and speak to women, and it’s an ideological pushback against
generations of condescension and insulting marketing towards women.61
Yet, in practice, this execution of feminism as a brand still relied on all the tenets
of exploitative labor: “low pay and substandard benefits”62 (especially for people
with uteruses), and, most importantly, exertion of power to maintain these
inequitable dynamics. If anything, a “feminist” business practice seemed to
resemble just a straight-up business practice.
Agrawal’s profit-focused defense also exhibited how divergent both a decent
workplace and a successful, profitable company often are, in that she presents
the latter as ultimately taking priority above the former (rather than the holistic
exercise that her company’s mission statement presents these realities to be)—
and that the financial success of her empire demanded this strategy at times. She
also aligns her business practices (and “disgruntled people”) with the broader
landscape of her industry, asserting a level of normalcy to these “misstep[s]”:
It’s SO easy to find fault and complain about what people didn’t get and
the things I lacked and I certainly admit wholeheartedly that I don’t have
it all. No question. And yes, you can make a bulleted list of every misstep
I’ve ever made (go for it), but what I am calling all of this is an
opportunity to learn and grow. Also, it’s a certainty that all founders will
have disgruntled people who feel thwarted by them throughout their
entrepreneurial adventures. Tough calls have to be made like terminating
people, and sometimes those terminated people can retaliate in ugly ways
and I learned that we have to be prepared for it. All of my successful
founder friends shared the same stories.63
Despite a feminist allegiance or self-identification, Agrawal finds commonality
with her other “successful founder friends”; basically, other capitalists. It’s also
significant that in this moment of reflection about the timeline of her company,
both failures and successes, and “learnings that I will take with me for the rest of
my life,” Agrawal ultimately and publicly allies herself with business and other
entrepreneurs rather than feminism. She does not publicly use this as an
opportunity to perhaps re-interrogate her own understanding of gender
inequality.
After allegations of harassment, abuse, exploitative labor, and devaluation of
her team, she sides with business—not feminism. And she defends the
structures, channels, and expectations of business when confronted with
litigation that she abused women. (The claim was dropped after the case was
settled out of court.)64
Coming to the defense of powerful institutions when said power is
challenged by abuse allegations is a cornerstone of white feminism, as the
allegiance is ultimately to profits, power, and prestige over abuse. This tactic was
similarly exhibited in 2017 by Arianna Huffington, a board member at Uber,
following claims of sexual harassment. In February of that year, Susan Fowler, a
former Uber engineer, published a blog post (later expanded into her book
Whistleblower) detailing being sexually propositioned by her boss, reporting the
incident to HR, and essentially being told that her alleged harasser was too
important to the company to take disciplinary measures:
I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find
another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I
could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would
most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came
around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that
this didn’t seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the
team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team
was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company’s best interest
to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and
again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if
I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”. I
tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my
own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him
a stern-talking [sic] to and didn’t want to ruin his career over his “first
offense”).65
After switching teams, Fowler began sharing her experiences with other women
engineers. Like her, they had experienced sexual harassment at the company,
sometimes by the same manager who had harassed her, and all had similar
experiences with the HR department. By these timelines, she was able to
ascertain that this particular manager had been harassing other women before
she even joined the company:
It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about
this being “his first offense”, and it certainly wasn’t his last. Within a few
months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those
who reported him were told it was still his “first offense”. The situation
was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing
was done.
Myself and a few of the women who had reported him in the past
decided to all schedule meetings with HR to insist that something be
done. In my meeting, the rep I spoke with told me that he had never been
reported before, he had only ever committed one offense (in his chats with
me), and that none of the other women who they met with had anything
bad to say about him, so no further action could or would be taken. It was
such a blatant lie that there was really nothing I could do. There was
nothing any of us could do.66
The following month, Huffington, who was overseeing an investigation into the
company, told CNN that she had personally spoken with hundreds of women at
Uber and that the head of HR—the same HR that was allegedly siding with
alleged predators due to their performance—had conducted “120 listening
sessions” with employees.67 Uber also reportedly hired former U.S. Attorney
General Eric Holder and Tammy Albarrán, partners at law firm Covington &
Burling, to conduct the investigation. Huffington told the outlet:
“Yes, there were some bad apples, unquestionably. But this is not a
systemic problem,” said Huffington. “What is important is that the
structures that were not in place are now being put in place to make sure
that women, minorities, everyone, feels completely comfortable at Uber.”
Three months later, NPR reported that Uber had fired twenty employees, some
of whom were senior executives, following over two hundred claims of sexual
harassment and workplace misconduct.68 Uber declined to comment on the
firings or disclose the names of terminated employees.69 Later that summer,
NPR also reported the details of a class-action lawsuit by the engineers that Uber
settled out of court. The $10 million settlement had been announced in March,
the same month that Huffington stated that the harassment was “not a systemic
problem.” The reported details of the settlement seemed to indicate otherwise,
given the number of plaintiffs and their accusations:
Fifty-six people are set to receive an average payout of nearly $34,000
because they filed specific claims of “incidents of discrimination,
harassment, and/or hostile work environment and connecting their
experiences to their race, national origin or gender,” court documents
state….
A larger group of 483 people will be paid an average of nearly $11,000
because of other discrimination claims, according to the documents. The
original lawsuit was filed by two Latina engineers, Roxana del Toro Lopez
and Ana Medina, who say they were systematically discriminated against
because of their gender and ethnic background.
Court filings say 487 class members were contacted about participating
in the case. Nobody objected, and two opted out.70
To me, Huffington’s public comments, assuring viewers, consumers, and
potential customers that these allegations were “not a systemic problem,”
attempted to neutralize what was reportedly facilitated, enacted, and
perpetuated across multiple layers within the company. Her phrasing about
“some bad apples” seeks to minimize the scope but also the accountability of the
harassment and discrimination. It feigns resolution and control by making the
solution key firings rather than a re-interrogation of company culture and values,
specifically a lucrative and successful business venture. This strategy reflects a
larger misinterpretation of systemic abuse, because, oftentimes, we aren’t
necessarily trying to shoehorn out individuals—but rather abolish entire ways of
thinking, mindsets, and structures. Removing specific people, even very
powerful ones, can distort that mission and deflects the scrutiny from the entire
enterprise to one individual—someone who is no longer there. And so the
venture is salvaged.
Much like Agrawal, Huffington ultimately aligns herself with the prosperity,
future, and questioned reputation of the company.
Huffington identifies as a feminist.

Chapter Fifteen
What the Privilege Disclaimer Doesn’t

Accomplish
SOMETHING HAPPENED WHEN WHITE feminism figured out the word “privileged.”
For a good cultural moment there, the word started to make the rounds in
arguments, speaking to a very specific outlook to societal problems that does not
take into account people with fewer resources, advantages, or cultural
differences.
But then the course changed. The baseline acknowledgment of these societal
power dynamics became enough to basically excuse you. To drop this word or
recognize these circumstances to which your race or your gender or your class
have allotted you was considered the beginning and end of the conversation. To
say you were “privileged” operated more like a transparency measure rather than
an incentive to engage further. Parroted back to me by my managers as we
continued to cover the same thin actresses talking about the same rich problems
through the same heterosexual lens, “white privilege” almost became like the
cultural permission slip that made it okay to keep the focus there. Using the
term also became a way to deflect scrutiny of practices and neutralize critiques.
Sure, all these women are privileged—but let’s keeping talking about them 365
days a year anyway! And here is an anecdotal line about how women of color make
73 cents to the dollar to inoculate this piece against accusations of racism. This is
how “privileged” came to function as a personal disclaimer rather than a
perforation.
It’s taken a lot of astute deflection to get here, to twist “privilege” around so
that it still maintains and ultimately serves the power structures that keep
whiteness at the center rather than challenge them. Especially because
acknowledging systemic advantages, I find, is an important if not entirely
foundational way to begin undoing social oppression. For intersectional
identities, properly decentering yourself is essential to recognizing where you are
on the spectrum of advantages: poor white cis woman, Black middle-class trans
woman, white upper-class lesbian. But, at the same time, so is recognizing places
where you are not centered in the first place. Acknowledging that what you take
for granted would be someone else’s boon can be pivotal for self-awareness.
But, in practice, “privileged” is often the cul de sac of white feminism—the
way by which you go through the motions of racial or queer consciousness, but
actually just come out the same way you came in. Years of watching white
feminist colleagues throw this word on the table with the heft of a 1997
September issue and expect nothing short of a parade has often reminded me
just how low the bar for racial literacy is in many workplaces. You’re
acknowledging that you’re the power holder in all, if not most, spaces, and that’s
presented as sufficient on its own.
Where you see this most consistently is the personal calculation of time as a
feminist metric.
New York magazine’s The Cut’s “How I Get It Done,” a recurring series that
distills the personal and professional schedule of “successful women,” traffics in
this, while also framing maximum productivity, a capitalistic value, as the
ultimate goal. All pieces begin with an introduction of a hyper-condensed
summary of the subject’s professional background, family, and relationship
status before uniformly ending on “how she gets it all done” or “how she gets it
done.” The series always begins with a dissection of her morning routine. Many,
like this one focused on SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan, detail a cumbersome
maze of satisfying both the needs of children and employers:
On her morning routine:
I have an [sic] 9-year-old son, Lachlan, and a 6-year-old daughter,
Charlotte. I travel so much and work very long hours, so when I’m not
traveling and I’m home, I try to take my kids to school, I think it’s really
important. They are my alarm clock—they’re up at 6 and don’t go to
school until 7:30, so it’s a really active time to spend with the family. My
husband is usually the first one up and out the door. Before I leave with
the kids I spend 10 or 15 minutes on my phone just getting prepared for
the day. SoulCycle’s numbers come in at 4 in the morning, so I look at
those. I get them to school, talk to a couple of moms and teachers, and see
what’s going on.1
Despite whatever admitted lack of structure, science, or calculus does consume
some part of their days or careers or personal lives, the true thrust of the series is
to relay “hacks,” “work-life balance” tips, or various “routines” that can be
replicated to maximize productivity, like this strategy from Eva Chen, director of
fashion partnerships at Instagram:
On her best email hack:
Think about the emails you send in any given day. You’re probably
responding to the same ten topics. For example, someone will invite me to
an event and I’ll be out of town, so my response is, “I’m sorry, I can’t
make it. I’m out of town.” Instead of typing that out, I have it saved as a
signature. So basically I have ten signatures saved on my email like, “Sorry
I’m out of town I can’t make it,” “I’ll be there,” “CCing my admin to set
up a meeting,” etc. It makes a big difference.2
These productivity narratives skirt feminist principles or sexist experiences but
often without identifying them as such, subtly coding these accounts as feminist
without ever actually having to commit to an ideology, practice, or critique. Like
this experience from Whelan:
On being the only woman in a room:
From the moment I chose engineering as my college major until now,
I’ve often been in the minority in a variety of situations. What I’ve always
tried to do is be really clear on my point of view and have a really keen
understanding of what the business needs, whether it was a problem set in
an engineering classroom or a presentation in a room full of men—to have
confidence and conviction underpinned with a lot of hard work to make
sure that I know my information better than anybody. I’m raising a son
who has a mother who’s a CEO. It’s just going to be very different in 20 to
30 years.3
In this hyper-distilled account, Whelan is captured by The Cut as essentially
developing a personal way of navigating and surviving within a massive
structural failure: the lack of women in her college engineering classes and
through her career. That she is depicted as having an individualized strategy to
succeed within systemic failure—“confidence,” “conviction,” and “hard
work”—reveals how she ultimately processes “being the only woman in the
room,” and what kind of feminism (white) is being practiced to combat said
failure of diversity.
Whelan’s next observation about her son’s impending reality, having a CEO
for a mother, both assumes that the reader is equating a female CEO with some
version of feminism or gender parity—again, fusing female corporate presence
with feminism, but also evidencing another pillar of contemporary white
feminism: that by Whelan occupying this CEO role, she has already put a
progressive change regarding gender equality into action. The simple declarative
that “It’s just going to be very different in 20 or 30 years” furthers this
interpretation of politicized action and encourages a highly personalized
understanding of revolution. Whelan’s assertion that “It’s just going to be very
different” both employs the narrative that feminist changes have already
occurred while also preserving sexist structures by advocating for individualized
rather than collective strategies to combat them.
This preservation-of-systems/individualized-solutions binary is frequently
employed when it comes to professional advice on gender. A lot of what is
advised in this space is about keeping the status quo on a structural level. Like a
2018 New York Times advice piece on salary negotiating in which an expert
advises, “Don’t be timid, but use the right inflection and wording choices.”4 Or
when CEO Tory Burch, in a 2016 essay on LinkedIn, framed sexism in business
as “some systematic impediments to success for women,” but nevertheless
encouraged personal reflection: “Be mindful of your words and actions. Ask
yourself: Did you really need to modify that sentence with ‘just,’ ‘I think
maybe,’ or ‘kind of’? Why did I sit against the wall rather than at the table in the
last business meeting? Have I downplayed my desire to move up and succeed?”5
Similarly, Carol Sankar, an author and founder of the Confidence Factor for
Women in Leadership, observed in 2017, “Negotiating is a necessary skill that
will close the gender gap.”6 Individual skill sets are presented as the pathway to
revolutionary change.
This tension, between securing increased rights but keeping systems as they
are, was detected in a 2018 Refinery29 CBS news poll. The survey determined
that a little more than half of millennial women polled didn’t identify as
feminists.7 One participant, identified as twenty-two-year-old Leah, told the
outlet that her answer was “complicated” because increased access to birth
control and the right to vote were clear feminist wins. But it’s the continued
push beyond these wins, and “the aggressive push for abortion,” that Leah finds
off-putting. “I do want us to be societally equal,” she said. “I feel like the
movement has been largely taken over by far-left wing activists…”8 The notion
that the movement was “taken over” by activists, rather than originated by them,
speaks to the unfounded origin stories of how rights for marginalized people are
secured in the first place: it starts with activists, a fact you can trace through the
suffragettes who picketed President Woodrow Wilson for the right to vote
(during World War I, no less)9 and Emma Goldman, one of the 1910s activists
who was jailed for handing out information about birth control.10 Gender rights
have always been propelled by deeply radical people who were raging against the
status quo. But the consistently and truly impressive breadth of progress is that
what was deemed radical then always has the capacity to feel commonplace now.
And downplaying how critical transgressive activism has been to securing
gender rights presents another hologram: that you can achieve them within the
status quo.
In a 2018 Cosmopolitan.com piece entitled “Why You Need a ‘Work Wife,’”
the introduction describes professional problems like feeling “swamped” with
tasks and being singled out by a boss for being late.11 The proposed fix for these
systemic and widely documented blockades to women’s professional security,
economic security, and career advancement is actually to connect with other
women. But, in classic white feminist form, even establishing bonds with other
women has to come with individual gain—not policy solutions together. “Cool
opportunities,” such as professional advancement, are increased by “find[ing] a
gal around your same level and with whom you’ve had casual, pleasant convos.”
The aim is to “Feel out her potential by asking for small favors that benefit you
both: ‘Want to brainstorm over lunch before tomorrow’s presentation?’” The
eventual strategy is to “try asking for a bigger solid, like covering your shift (and,
duh, offer to do the same for her). Then follow these tips to nurture that
dynamic and rock the work-wife life.” The reader is then not only encouraged to
strategically erode and evaluate personal relationships with a monetary or a
professional value but to eventually manipulate this partnership into increased
mutual white-collar labor.
This is how white feminism mimics the exploitative labor of traditional
patriarchy. “The work-wife life” ostensibly is to find and exploit your own
woman within a white-collar framework, and encourage her to do the same with
you, rather than advocate for additional employees to share the “swamped”
workload, restructuring within the company, or formalized shared responsibility
that is recognized within job descriptions and even increased pay or title changes.
The incentive is to continue to perform invisible labor with complete invisibility,
and mimicking a capitalistic approach to exploiting other women—a historically
disposable resource—to increase individual ascension.
This reflects a wider cultural trend, in which communities of women getting
together took on a more robust theme of “networking” rather than unionizing,
striking, walking out, or drafting policy. While adopting the tone of social
change and the vocabulary of community, the tactics were always engineered for
personal gain. In 2014, the tagline of Politico’s Women Rule conference was
“Innovating a Movement.” The Wing espoused in 2020 that they are “carrying
the torch” of women’s club movements by citing Ida B. Wells, an activist who
notably founded her Black women’s club to end lynching among other racial
injustices. But trading on these histories and imagery to actually just remain
individually “empowered” is often how this lens operates.
Katherine Goldstein, a journalist, host of the podcast The Double Shift, and
former Lean In “superfan,” explained in 2018 how this particular idea of
feminism furnished her “with plenty of damaging illusions” about gender and
discrimination.12 But she concludes her critique of corporate feminism by
asserting this important and deviating truth: “Women are realizing that looking
out for each other is even more powerful than just looking out for ourselves.”13
This collective understanding of oppression—both in experience and in
strategy against it—is evidenced in the thousands of Google employees who
internationally walked out in 2018 following what they perceived to be the
company’s mishandling of sexual misconduct claims, as well as racism and
discrimination.14 Or when McDonald’s workers also coordinated a multi-city
walkout to protest alleged sexual harassment15 a couple years after a survey
found that 40 percent of fast food employees had experienced it.16 In weighing
these important standoffs with corporate power, Goldstein notes, “I now believe
the greatest lie of Lean In is its underlying message that most companies and
bosses are ultimately benevolent, that hard work is rewarded, that if women shed
the straitjacket of self-doubt, a meritocratic world awaits us.”17 But white
feminism consistently tells us, from a place of disenfranchisement, that
companies are inherently good. So good that it’s “feminist” to get even more
ingratiated within them. They aren’t even to blame when you don’t get a raise,
or are overlooked for a position; you should have spoken up more, been clearer
about what value you bring.
But it’s this pervasive belief that “good”—whether it be in policies,
representation, or wages—will come from the powerful company that is
ultimately misguided. Vehicles and strategies that keep power in check like
unions, walkouts, strikes, labor negotiations, organizations, and policy proposals
—with in-house support—have historically kept companies on the better side of
humanity. It’s often us, the people on the ground, the employees who are being
asked to stretch beyond what is feasible, who are being harassed and told that
“that’s just the way it is” who will engender this balance of power. The
protections that we need will not come from them given the nature of this
relationship; they have to come from and be asserted by us.
Part III
The Winds of Change
In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power,
there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the
genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some
human beings can envision a world that has never existed.
—Anne Braden, author and anti-racist activist1

Chapter Sixteen
A New Era of Feminism

IF WE ARE APPROACHING this movement as the suffragettes designed—simply as
having access to what cis white men have—white feminism has been hurtling
along at a pretty successful rate. Between 2014 and 2019, women-owned
businesses in the United States grew 21 percent compared to 8 percent growth in
employment.1 A big part of this remarkable headway was women-of-color-
owned enterprises, which accounted for 50 percent of all those new women-
owned businesses in 2019.2 Black women owned most of these firms, but across
a good half of all non-white-women-owned businesses, they ran the gamut from
hair and nail salons to consultants and public relations firms.3 I credit the
sweeping culture of Lean In ethos with erecting this landscape, for building off
the last four decades in which women have constituted most of the college
graduates,4 and single women make up most first-time homebuyers.5
When I place a vote for the president of the United States, open a credit card
in my own name, and secure birth control without written permission from my
father or husband on my way to pursue a college education, I am actively
inhabiting the world that Alice Paul envisioned.
But if we want a multigendered, browner feminism where all women’s needs
are addressed, we need to reevaluate what we are pushing for in the first place.
We need a courageous new concept, one that prioritizes and tackles the systems
that keep most marginalized genders in poverty, abuse, and incarceration. If
power is how we have traditionally understood the path to equality, we need to
address that our current framework will not facilitate power broadly toward the
most disenfranchised. We’ll always be speaking in anomalies: the single mother
who managed to build a business, the gay woman who got to the top of this
company. A domestic worker may never be a CEO, and that shouldn’t hinder
her ability to live above the poverty line.
We need to build a more holistic, ambitious approach to inequality that
doesn’t just isolate a single issue as definitive Feminism or ask that we aspire to
that single issue. Nationally, we need a tiered movement toward gender equality
that addresses the reality of people’s lives and that involves not only marginalized
genders being seen, but securing food and basic resources like clean water and
housing. Then workplace protections, decent wages, and a reformed justice
system. Finally, once basic needs, workplace protections, and our legal system are
secured, women and nonbinary people need the opportunities to grow through
education and small-business opportunities. White feminism has never been this
movement.
It’s when these foundational pieces are fragmented, omitted, or presented in
an alternate order that progress for gender rights is stifled. Opening lofty
educational opportunities to people who are food insecure will not help them.
Opening industries with rampant harassment and assault to women will not
advance them. But I often think of white feminism as an exercise in this exact
strategy.
In the big, bright world of oppression, white feminism has often defaulted to
choosing a flavor of subjugation and exercising all understanding of gender
oppression from there. White feminism of then and now has demonstrated an
unwavering dedication to focusing only on sexism and has deflected
multigenerational attempts to expand this lens. In 1913, Alice Paul
triumphantly coordinated a parade with thousands of women to demand the
right to vote, but a sensibility and legacy of Elizabeth Cady Stanton ensured that
only affluent white women would reap the gains. In 1920, when Doris Stevens
was reflecting on her arrest outside the White House for protesting for suffrage,
she said that “it was never martyrdom for its own sake. It was martyrdom used
for a practical purpose.”6 But that “practical purpose” would be an agenda of
only “feminism.” In 1963, it was Betty Friedan’s assertion that her foundational
book, The Feminine Mystique, distilled the universal gender truth of “the
problem with no name.” But, in real application, her pertinent analysis only
applied to economically secure housewives. Sexism is not the sole arbiter of
oppression; but when you review the canon of white feminism, you would think
otherwise.
This very particular history has informed a lot of more modern efforts to
mobilize. The truly clumsy execution here, though, is often to try and apply this
simplistic “sexism only” framework to women who are not white, who don’t
necessarily identify as women to begin with, who aren’t rich, who aren’t straight.
This is the turning point we are facing now. And this is the conflict playing
out behind the scenes with the leadership of the women’s movement today.
The day after Donald Trump was elected president, Teresa Shook, a retired
attorney and grandmother living in Hawaii, created a Facebook page for a
protest.7 In the lead-up to the election, women and other marginalized genders
were rightfully infuriated after spending the better part of an election cycle
immersed in Trump’s round-the-clock misogyny, a direct platform that had now
landed him the presidency. Republican candidate Trump had made many a
sexist, slanderous comment about Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton,
calling her “such a nasty woman,”8 ridiculing her “shouting,” and crediting her
success to proficient use of the “woman’s card.”9 He had a pronounced record
of calling women “pigs,” “slobs, “dogs,”10 and had joked about “dating” his
daughter, Ivanka.11 And when questioned on this record, as Fox host Megyn
Kelly had done during a presidential debate in 2015, Trump later said, “She had
blood coming out of her eyes. Or blood coming out of her wherever.”12 But
despite that clear precedent, critiques of Trump’s contempt for women reached
a strikingly different tier when the Washington Post ran some Access Hollywood
footage of him bragging about assaulting women, saying, “I just start kissing
them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they
let you do it. You can do anything,” including “grab ’em by the pussy.”13
Action was in order, and women like Shook coordinated accordingly. The
same night that she made her Facebook page, on the other side of the country, a
Brooklyn-based fashion designer named Bob Bland suggested a protest on
Facebook. Bland and Shook eventually combined their events, as RSVPs swelled
into the thousands.14 Some women began to volunteer as organizers, but a
homogeny was building. Bland later specified, “The reality is that the women
who initially started organizing were almost all white. As the movement grew,
they sought ways to address this crucial issue.”15
Addressing this matter meant bringing in career activists like Tamika D.
Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour as national co-chairs, women who, by
Bland’s account, “are not tokens; they are dynamic and powerful leaders who
have been organizing intersectional mobilizations for their entire careers.”16 The
intention for the Women’s March on Washington, as it was finally called, from
organizers like Janaye Ingram, Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs, Karen Waltuch, and
Cassady Fendlay was inclusivity across Native people, disabled women, trans
women, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and other communities.
The date was set for January 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s
inauguration, for a massive, multi-city march that was also multi-issue in its
execution: LGBTQ rights, racial equality, disability rights, human rights,
immigration reform, women’s rights, and environmental protections17—
basically, everyone who would be further disenfranchised by this presidency.
With sister marches in fifty states, the Women’s March would be the largest
single-day protest in American history with no arrests in Washington, D.C.18
But behind the scenes, controversy and disorganization were fracturing the hope
of this new movement.
From the beginning, a common critique of the Women’s March was that the
movement was “unfocused.”19 In 2017, Sarsour disagreed with this
interpretation, telling the Washington Post that the point wasn’t that all women
“see themselves in every platform.”20 Leading up to the march, organizers did
release a policy platform that detailed demands for an Equal Rights
Amendment, reproductive freedom, equal pay, labor protections for immigrant
and undocumented people, an end to police brutality, comprehensive
healthcare, and access to affordable housing.21
But I think a word like “unfocused” is sometimes a reactive term to nuance,
when we don’t initially recognize a clean, single issue that dominant cultures
immediately identify as familiar. Because that’s what the Women’s March
definitely wasn’t. Organizers and participants were able to erect a multifaceted
platform that successfully attracted people from all over the country of varying
faiths, ideologies, and life experiences—well beyond the objectives and principles
of white feminism. No other “wave” of feminism—a reductive term that
collapses movements into one ideology—had ever accomplished bringing this
many people together in the name of gender rights. In the coming years, though,
the Women’s March would grow organizationally weaker. In 2018, co-chairs
Mallory, Bland, and Perez were accused of making anti-Semitic comments
during the Women’s March planning meetings.22 (Bland and Mallory denied
this.) Allegations of this ilk had been building for the better part of that year. In
February, Mallory had attended the Nation of Islam Saviours’ Day event where
minister Louis Farrakhan made a slew of anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ remarks.
During his speech, he recognized Mallory by name, who had reportedly also
promoted the event on her Instagram.23 Calls escalated on social media (and
quietly within newsrooms, I remember) for her to renounce Farrakhan. A week
later, the Women’s March released a statement saying that Farrakhan’s beliefs
did not align with their own principles, and they stood with Mallory. A day
later, Mallory wrote a piece detailing her connection to Saviours’ Day, an event
she had attended as a child and would continue to attend for support after her
son’s father was murdered in 2001.24 She clarified:
I attend meetings with police and legislators—the very folks so much of
my protest has been directed towards. I’ve partnered and sat with
countless groups, activists, religious leaders and institutions over the past
20 years. I’ve worked in prisons as well as with present and former gang
members.
It is impossible for me to agree with every statement or share every
viewpoint of the many people who I have worked with or will work with
in the future.25
Mallory went on to make similar defenses after being interviewed on The View
in 2019.26 By then, Shook, who first made that catalytic Facebook page, had
called on co-chairs Mallory, Perez, Sarsour, and Bland to resign because of “their
refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful
beliefs.”27 Three of them did, as, according to the press release, their terms had
expired: Mallory, Bland, and Sarsour. Seventeen more women joined the
national Women’s March Board,28 and Perez stayed on with the organization,
writing in the Daily News that, ultimately, “the organization did not act quickly
enough to address the criticism head-on, causing hurt and confusion.”29
I believe that Mallory’s career as an activist does call for sharing tables,
meetings, and discussions with people who publicly advocate for causes you
don’t agree with or even fight for. (On a much more minor level, I’ve sat at
brands and in meetings with people who, although I’m unified with on a
masthead, I have little in common with politically or even ideologically.) But it’s
imperative to distinguish that what Mallory’s career activism requires—sitting
with and speaking with people who are wildly homophobic, anti-Semitic, and
anti-Black—isn’t what the Women’s March branding calls for, which is a unified
and visual front against these beliefs.
The brand had been effectively fractured.
The unity felt by many in 2017 hadn’t quite carried through the following
year. Women’s March, Inc. had engendered a separate organization named
March On, geared toward incentivizing women in red states to vote and organize
around tipping elections in progressive directions.30 While publicly, the two
groups remained civil and respectful toward one another’s differing goals,
continual comments on social media suggested they were frustrated and
confused by one another’s differing agendas, strategies, and branding.31
By the 2019 Women’s March, participation numbers had fallen: one hundred
thousand participants attended in Washington, D.C. By 2020, “tens of
thousands” of protestors were gathering in January, estimated to be upward of
twenty-five thousand, as many did not formally sign up to attend.32
Within the masses of people who genuinely wanted change, though, there
was another motivation that threatened solidarity: the rise of “protesting is the
new brunch.”
Leading up to the first Women’s March, the proliferation of pussy hats, pink
knitted caps created by Jayna Zweiman and Krista Suh, came to suggest a very
different kind of attendance. Both women “conceived the idea of creating a sea
of pink hats at Women’s Marches everywhere that would make both a bold and
powerful visual statement of solidarity,” according to the Pussyhat Project’s
website.33 Named in reference to Trump’s pussy-grabbing comments, the hats
were also intended to serve as a symbol of “empowerment” and as a visual
marker for “women’s rights,” even if you could not physically attend the
march.34 But the “iconic global symbol of political activism,” as it is described by
the creators, also became conflated with a very specific Women’s March
attendee: a branded one. Someone who made sure to wear their NASTY
WOMAN shirt from Etsy and pack their FEMINIST water bottle from
Amazon and take lots of selfies with trending hashtags. Someone who was more
preoccupied with positioning themselves as activist chic rather than necessarily
advocating for undocumented women.
These dynamics would be immortalized in a photograph captured at the
march depicting Black activist Angela Peoples carrying a protest sign that read
“Don’t Forget: White Women Voted for Trump.” As if directly evidencing her
point, in the background were several white-passing women with pink pussy
hats taking photos on their phones. Their captured glee and her stoic expression
also underscored the difference in their respective activist experiences. In one
frame, the differing allegiances of white feminists and women of color were
captured—and the photograph, captured by Kevin Banatte,35 went viral on
social media and beyond.
It’s true that social media was a prominent force in both assembling the
march and disseminating its message. As a grassroots movement, individuals
sharing their participation, intention to go, and support of different platforms
was the lifeblood of the assembly. A survey of Women’s March participants from
2017 concluded that over half of participants planned to share their opinions on
social media.36
But with the advent of personal branding, those lines became blurred.
The day after the 2016 election results, I took to Instagram—a lot of people
did. I had been up most of the night before desperately turning around a
number of pieces for MarieClaire.com that I had assigned under a projected
Hillary Clinton win. As has been the case for most of my career, I had a
professional reaction first and a personal reaction later. (The last text I remember
sending that night was to a reporter confirming a deadline.) In the morning,
after my assignments were safely rejiggered for a Trump win, I posted a vintage,
yet iconic image of Gloria Steinem holding the “We Shall Overcome” sign on my
personal account and then headed into work to see all my colleagues crying. I
didn’t realize it at the time, but my instinctive pull for vintage protest imagery
would soon be reflected everywhere.
Since the election, there has been a visibly aggressive uptick in protests and
protest imagery—across social media and editorial coverage. The imagery reflects
an overall shift in activism participation: according to a poll in 2018, one in five
Americans had attended a protest since 2016, and of that group nearly 20
percent had never protested before.37 There have been many protests to choose
from, across varying political allegiances and causes. The major ones around the
country in just the first year of Trump’s presidency included:
Election night when Trump’s win was announced, 2016
Women’s March, January 2017
Travel ban, January/February 2017
DAPL, February/March 2017
International Women’s Day, March 2017
March for Science, April 2017
Pride #ResistMarch, June 2017
Philando Castile protests, June 2017
Healthcare bill protests, June 2017
Unite the Right Rally, August 2017
DACA, September 2017
White Lives Matter, October 2017
Trump protest on anniversary of election, November 2017
I participated in a number of these, as did my colleagues—and many of us
posted images documenting these historic moments. But something else, less
journalistic-focused and more self-serving, was accelerating this year.
At the time, this uptick was glibly quantified as “Protesting is the new
brunch.” This class-divisive framing of the political landscape seemed to
underscore that for the brunching crowd, engaging in organized protest was
how they were now spending their weekends. Denisha Jones, an assistant
professor of teacher education at Trinity Washington University, told the New
York Times in 2017 that she was seeing this in a literal way: “I did notice that it’s
getting to be more of a type of social event. Folks I normally go to brunch with,
we go to protests.”
Part of this narrative was to encapsulate both the frequency of organized
protests post-Trump, as well as the fact that many of them were on the
weekends. But the broader press framing that protesting was becoming a
“lifestyle,” as the Times reported, had unfortunate repercussions. The white
feminist practice of Instagram framing of activism as “brunch” stands in stark
contrast to Black Lives Matter protestors being shot and Black civil rights
protestors losing their lives in the 1960s. Enduring here is that for white
feminism (as well as white and white-passing women), protest is a safe endeavor.
In its most unembellished form, though, activism is a lifestyle. When I’ve
interviewed lifelong activists or read their historical accounts, I am left with the
resounding reality that this type of work is a very particular way of living and
seeing. The willingness to disrupt systems, both big and small, with your
presence, with your voice, with your physical body, is a way of life. Erica Garner
led marches twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6 p.m., after watching a
viral video of her dying father, Eric Garner, tell New York police officers, “I can’t
breathe.”38 Dolores Huerta has been arrested more than twenty times for union
demonstrating.39 For the Native American water protectors who stood their
ground during Standing Rock, their strategies of encampment were a deeply
ingrained resistance action plan dating back to pre-colonialist times.40 This, in
effect, becomes the way you live.
But something very different happens when you say the word “lifestyle”
among people who don’t have this comprehension of social justice. “Lifestyle”
evokes an aesthetic—clothes you wear, products you use, accessories you swear
by, a way of visually aligning your life so that you give off a certain impression.
Sometimes that impression is wealth or creativity or authority. And in the case of
activism, it’s unfortunately an impression of “cool.”
For media and advertisers, the incentive is generally to translate impressions
into things you can buy. You embody “cool” by owning this shirt or wearing
your hair this way or participating in this beauty trend. But impressions quite
literally translate to the social media landscape as well, where engagement with
people as brands or brands as people has become virtually interchangeable. And
“Protesting is the new brunch” alluded to a particular development in white
feminism and beyond: activism packaging.
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, all legitimate spaces for organizing and
protesting, have also allowed political allegiance and identity politics to become
performative—with audiences, followers, and endorsements. Branding yourself
as an activist is a prominent pillar of white feminism, in that you present
yourself as being part of the #resistance but aren’t necessarily advocating for
structural change. You are visually aligning yourself with feminism much in the
way you would by purchasing a certain sweatshirt or putting a witchy coven case
on your iPhone. Photographs or tweets from marches have unfortunately
become another extension of a corporate-sanctioned, ad-based revolution. With
“like” buttons and quantifiable metrics, supporting a certain cause or deviating
from a mainstream initiative carries immense individual gain: a platform you can
yield to carry over into another cultural influence. And with the intersection of
social justice and capitalism, white feminism is right there to sell you everything
from co-working spaces to lingerie with activist imagery from the past and
present.
Profit aside, social media isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel on this one.
Activists generally do hope to gain followings, groups of people who still stand
with them to enact change. But where platforms like Instagram and Twitter add
a new dimension is that they have a transferable following that is easily accessible
to corporations. You can craft a post that supports Equal Pay Day and then do
another that shills a “feminist” sweatshirt made by women who were definitely
not paid well. The same people who liked the first post will probably like the
second.
A general, butterfingered critique of this dilemma tends to bemoan social
media altogether. Like the innate capability to share a message or an image or a
photograph with anyone in the world instantly is somehow wrong or nefarious.
(I also find that this argument lives not far from the concerns about “everyone
having a voice now”—a veiled concern about white supremacy, misogyny, and
racism being decentralized in culture.)
But I don’t find wide-sweeping denigrations about social media to be helpful
in identifying what’s actually at work here. This reasoning also does a
tremendous disservice to the amount of organization and activism that has
found support through social media: #YesAllWomen, #BlackLivesMatter, SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #NoDAPL, and, of course, #MeToo, among many others both regionally and internationally. When I’ve covered these
movements and clicked through these tweets and posts in the past, I’ve often felt
like I’m witnessing the next evolution of what the Jewish housewives achieved
when they designed their meat boycott fliers in 1902, or what the wives and
mothers in the 1940s were able to orchestrate when they used telephones to
reach more women. Platforms and ways to organize definitely change with the
times—but the driving forces often remain the same: we won’t take this. And
taking to any medium of the time to relay that message has the capacity to be
impactful.
What’s decidedly different, though, about a Jewish housewife from 1902
refusing to buy meat with her neighbors and an actor doing an Instagram post
for #WomensMarch is those Jewish housewives weren’t trying to then parlay NOMEAT into cultural relevance. There was no social currency in them walking out of synagogue when men told them they were an embarrassment to the community. There was no professional gain to be had in pulling meat from
customers’ hands—but there was a lot to lose. The respect of the men in their
neighborhood (always a premium), physical safety, personal reputation, possible
arrest, and ostracization. But they did it anyway, because the cost to their families
and their children was simply too great not to.
Now, there stand to be individual gains from certain types of activism. The
neoliberal reality in which we can all be quantified as personal brands—a big
pillar of fourth-wave white feminism—means that these personal gains (actual
social media metrics) can be translated into capital. Positioning yourself as an
activist may very well cost you allegiances, certain partnerships, or specific people
willing to work with you. But the gains have proved to be just as valuable. When
Angela Davis organized interracial study groups as a teenager to protest
segregation, they were broken up by the police. When NFL quarterback Colin
Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality,
he became a spokesperson for Nike with a tennis shoe named after him.41 When
Sacheen Littlefeather declined Marlon Brando’s Academy Award on his behalf,
to protest the industry’s depiction of Native Americans, the academy introduced
tighter restrictions on proxy acceptances.42 Over forty years later, when certain
people from that same industry wanted to combat systemic harassment and
assault, Time’s Up was engineered much like a corporate brand, with a CEO
and president, as I reported for Out magazine in 2019.43 Depending on your
own politics or whatever platform you deem most advantageous, you stand to
gain more literal followers, receive more partnerships, and attract more people to
work with you by way of taking some kind of a stance, no matter how
unnuanced or vague.
A 2018 Spotted44 report that sought to quantify this determined that
supporting #MeToo was helpful to a celebrity’s brand,45 which, to quote
Harron Walker, the Jezebel writer who covered the study at the time, “feels kind
of weird and is not the point!”46
Janet Comenos, cofounder and CEO of Spotted, told Digiday of the
findings, “We’re living in an increasingly data-driven world when one thing can
wreck your brand. From the #MeToo perspective, I think there’s a little bit of a
misperception that celebrities involved were putting themselves at risk by being
outspoken, but the data shows the opposite. Consumers feel that they’re more
relatable.”47
Given the raging epidemic that is sexual assault and abuse, there is an
immense cultural shift in the public finding figures speaking to these experiences
as “likeable.” This is a new mass reaction, and I would like to think it builds on a
growing literacy about rape culture, predators, and the ways in which we have
societally facilitated sexual abuse by framing it as a personal responsibility and
failure rather than something we don’t hold abusers accountable for. Individuals
maintaining trustworthiness and credibility after citing abuse is a vast
improvement to being told that you shouldn’t have been wearing that, you
shouldn’t have been drinking, you shouldn’t have been there in the first place,
you shouldn’t have pursued that profession.
But where this credibility turns gross is when you throw the word “brand” in
there. If likeability can become a profit, then there are suddenly different
incentives. Companies and corporations are going to want in.
Amelia Hall, associate director of cultural strategy at TBWA Backslash,48
commented on this jump, observing to Digiday the profits that could
potentially be had from “#MeToo brand activation,” perhaps the most chilling
phrase I’ve ever heard. She said, “As celebrities lead these conversations and
consumers and the world react, I think it may inspire brands to do the same. The
fact there hasn’t been an overt #MeToo brand activation, I think we’ll see things
change.”49
Things are already changing. In a climate where politics can get robust social
media engagement, companies realize that they need to figure out a strategy to
keep people buying while they are protesting. But that doesn’t seem to include
spending more on internal infrastructure or practicing these politics. It’s about
optically messaging that they are aligned with them. And recruiting other people
to echo those messages for them.
Falk Rehkopf, the chief marketing officer at Ubermetrics, a data platform for
PR and marketers, wrote about the importance of prioritizing “brand activism”
in 2018. Of the road ahead, he observed:
We foresee that brand activism is becoming the rule and PR pros and
marketers will start working more closely with political brand advisors in
the near future. If your company hasn’t done so already, it’s crucial to
reflect upon your values and identify the causes that you want to stand up
for; after all, that’s the way to consumers’ hearts in 2019 and beyond.50
Ways to achieve this, he advises, include “identify[ing] potential influencers,
including the CEO, from whom activists want to hear.”51
This corruption of a grassroots movement started by Tarana Burke to convey
the scope of sexual abuse goes beyond companies trying to sell physical goods.
Everyone, it seems, has been trying to make money off this movement. Yahoo!
Finance reported in 2018 that “The #MeToo movement is a boon for big law
firms,”52 who are finding “It’s certainly a great revenue generator for law firms.”
That same year, the New York Times reported “How the Finance Industry Is
Trying to Cash In on #MeToo,” observing:
Accusations of sexual harassment have felled dozens of executives, but in
one quiet corner of the financial world, the #MeToo movement looks like
a golden opportunity.
Companies that offer money to plaintiffs in anticipation of future legal
settlements are racing to capitalize on sexual harassment lawsuits.53
Burke herself responded to how #MeToo had been widely distorted, saying in a
2018 TED Talk, “Suddenly, a movement to center survivors of sexual violence is
being talked about as a vindictive plot against men.”54 Focusing on what alleged
predators are losing as opposed to what victims need has always been a deeply
flawed framework for understanding or presenting systemic abuse. But her
comments also underscore what drove #MeToo as a response to the post–
Harvey Weinstein news cycle: centering survivors in a system that never has.
Burke conjures up a deep legacy of activism by describing collective unity to
subvert power. What she says could very well apply to the disability rights
movement, the industrial feminists who walked out of their factories, and many
other initiatives:
“We reshape that imbalance [of power] by raising our voices against it in
unison, by creating spaces that speak truth to power,” she said. “We have
to re-educate ourselves and our children to understand that power and
privilege doesn’t always have to destroy and take—it can be used to serve
and build.”55
In the context of white feminism, I think Burke’s words can be taken a step
further. Power and privilege doesn’t always have to be used to serve and build up
the individual. Discomfort, for more privileged sects, can be the threshold into
increased awareness. It’s the moments in which you shrink from that
discomfort, that you don’t walk through it, that you don’t interrogate why you
have such a corporal reaction to the demands of others, that those biases
maintain their place.
Prioritizing and catering to that uneasiness was exactly what some women
going into the Women’s March would do.
Challenging White Feminism
Twelve days before the march, the New York Times reported that some white
women—clearly ascribing to a “sexism only” ideology going into the march—
were bristling at the insistence that whiteness be assessed in the organized
response to the newly elected President Trump. But it’s the default of whiteness
that often holds the singular sexism lens firmly in place. For feminism
specifically, this has deep historical precedent. “When we actually get down to
representation or creating a list of demands or mobilizing around a set of ideas,”
Ashley Farmer, a historian at Boston University, explained to NPR in 2017, “it
tends to be that white middle-class or upper-class women’s priorities get put
above the rest.”56 Activists started openly discussing and prompting that the
march would include, and hopefully centralize, other platforms besides anti-
sexism. Some white feminists, though, were interpreting this reminder as if they
were, somehow, not welcome to the march because they were white.57
Jennifer Willis, a fifty-year-old minister from South Carolina who was
planning to bring her daughters to the march, reportedly canceled her trip. She
had read a Facebook post admonishing white allies for being so singular in their
activism.58 This was in response to a larger critique.
According to the dominant press narrative going into the Women’s March,
Trump’s presidential victory had “awakened” women to the xenophobic, racist,
and misogynistic ills of the country. For women who had been activists prior to
this election cycle, these grotesque societal ills were hardly new. They were well
in place before Trump assumed power and would most likely endure after. But
for white feminists who felt a direct and personal affront to Trump’s pussy-
grabbing comments who, say, didn’t attend a march in response to his racism
and immigrant hating, the call to action was suddenly now. The tonal
implication from much of this coverage suggested that now that they were under
attack, it was time to become an activist. To properly put this into perspective,
the Facebook post Willis reportedly read said, “You don’t just get to join because
now you’re scared, too. I was born scared,” alluding to a decidedly non-white
experience in the United States. Willis told the Times of her decision not to
attend, “This is a women’s march. We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay,
marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand black
women’?”59
What Willis and a number of other white feminists in the piece were
responding to was the assertion that the 2017 Women’s March would not solely
be about them. They largely interpreted this from social media. At the end of
2016, activist ShiShi Rose wrote a post on the official Women’s March
Instagram advising white allies to be “listening more, and talking less, spend time
observing… and unlearning the things you have been taught about this
country.”60 Various activists, many of them women of color, who had
participated in social justice work before—if not their entire careers—were
controlling for a tendency they know and encounter often: white supremacy.
And the very long history of activism in the United States has demonstrated
how whiteness, youth, heterosexuality, able, thin, cis bodies, and wealth can be
prioritized in even the most radical of movements.
But this decentering of whiteness was metabolized by white feminists as flatly,
Don’t come because you’re white. It speaks volumes about the insulation and self-
occupation whiteness—and white feminism—affords that a recognition of this
unique cultural scaffolding can be understood as a dis-invitation to attend
altogether. But some participants, in sensing that they would not be playing the
center role that this particular iteration of feminism and white supremacy has
guaranteed them, began to reconsider their participation.
On January 2, the Women’s March Facebook page posted the following
quote from bell hooks, underscoring how intersectional the march would aim to
be: “We could only become sisters in struggle by confronting the ways women—
through sex, class, and race—dominated and exploited other women, and
created a political platform that would address these differences.”61 White
feminism reacted accordingly. In the response thread, a woman from New Jersey
wrote, “I’m starting to feel not very welcome in this endeavor.”62 A woman
named Christine emphasized that she would still be attending but elaborated on
the sentiment, writing, “We all have our own fears and our own reasons for
marching. I don’t have to understand everyone’s reasons to know right from
wrong and to be kind to people.”63
It’s moments like these, in real time, in strategy, in execution, that white
feminism relies on their honored currency of niceties to maintain racist and
heterosexist practices. And it’s the legacy they’ve inherited directly from white
supremacy, their ability and culturally sanctioned way of basically saying that
they don’t care about Latinas or Black women or Asian women and still
managing to sound sweet while they do it. It’s the modern equivalent of “the
Negro problem” Anne Braden cited in her memoirs, with the same saccharine
tone and wholesome delivery.
What Christine is essentially saying is that she doesn’t have to understand
why Black women march, why Latinx people march, why queer Muslims march,
why cis immigrant women march. She just has to be “kind” and that will suffice
in moments of political solidarity. In white feminism, kindness and niceness
manage to carry the same cultural value as a literacy of structural bias and
discrimination. And it’s because white feminists sometimes are white, or aspire
to whiteness, that they are afforded this value system, this clean trade-off. It says
a lot more about what they have the power to leverage than it does about any
other cohort. It’s not like being kind has helped certain unarmed Black people
from evading police brutality or from talking an ICE agent out of taking your
undocumented husband away. Being nice works for them, though. It’s an
operational tenet of white womanhood and it’s what white anti-racist activist
women resign when they cross into that “other America,” as Braden said activist
Pat Patterson explained to her.64
But Christine’s comments provide a valuable window, a sort of time capsule,
into the lead-up to the 2017 Women’s March. You can see down through the
thread, as well as throughout the Facebook page of hopeful attendees, that many
of these participants are somehow aiming to build “nice” into their activism (not
to be conflated with nonviolence or peacefulness). Essentially, they want to take
white cis female privileges into the Women’s March and focus only on what
impacts them—sexism—while being “kind” to the other women in attendance.
This way of both, oddly, participating in a collective demonstration of gender
disenfranchisement while remaining the focal point of the march is often what
white feminism tries to marry. Social justice for all and equal pay but also, this is
all just really about me.
Signs that the march was attracting this kind of participation were reported as
the Women’s March approached. In Tennessee, when their sister march was
renamed to more closely reflect an alliance with the march in Washington,
“some complained that the event had turned from a march for all women into a
march for black women,” according to the New York Times.65 Like that’s a bad
thing. But white feminism is very sensitive to moments and strategies that shift
them from the default priority. In Louisiana, Candice Huber, a white bookstore
owner, resigned a state coordinator role when there were no women of color in
leadership positions.66 She told the outlet, “I got a lot of flak locally when I
stepped down, from white women who said that I’m alienating a lot of white
women.” Again, a paramount offense. And to properly stifle this deviation from
default whiteness, they pulled the evergreen word that I’ve heard in professional
settings, in meetings over content and reporting, in discussions of editorial
packages and phone calls with marketing departments, and with friends on a
sunny Sunday afternoon on the stoop of my apartment. Huber told the Times,
“They said, ‘Why do you have to be so divisive?’”
Responses like these prompted some women of color to publicly say that they
weren’t attending the 2017 Women’s March either. In the months after
President Trump was elected, heading to D.C. to stand shoulder to shoulder
with women who didn’t even understand the significance of #BlackLivesMatter
wasn’t exactly impactful. In fact, it seemed more like an Instagram moment. Nor
was it inspirational to be reduced to a human reminder of intersectional
feminism and having to police every pussy-hat-wearing woman who walked by.
Writer and columnist Jamilah Lemieux captured this well in a 2017 piece for
Colorlines.com, writing:
I’m really tired of Black and Brown women routinely being tasked with
fixing White folks’ messes. I’m tired of being the moral compass of the
United States. Many of the White women who will attend the march are
committed activists, sure. But for those new-to-it White women who just
decided that they care about social issues? I’m not invested in sharing
space with them at this point in history… Thus, I am affording myself the
emotional frailty usually reserved for White women and tapping out this
time. I’m not saying that I will never stand in solidarity with masses of
White women under the umbrella of our gender, but it won’t be this
weekend….67
Lemieux added that, one day, she would like to see “a million White women
march to the grave of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth or Audre Lorde, or
perhaps to the campus of Spelman College to offer a formal apology to Black
women.”68 But that would require a certain awareness of whiteness, how it
functions, what it protects you from, and what puncturing those privileges
would do. Going into the 2017 Women’s March, this self-awareness just didn’t
seem to be there. At least on a large-enough scale.
Again, social media provided a more intimate window into this dynamic.
Christine, the commenter who nicely affirmed that she didn’t need to
understand everyone’s reasons for attending, said in the same comment that the
“stereotyping” she was encountering online was “nasty.”69 But the
“stereotyping” that she encountered wasn’t about, say, subservient Asian women
or angry Black women or humorless lesbians. It was about white women. To her
account, she found a comment online that read “sprinkle some pumpkin spice
on the issues so white women will take an interest.”70
The “emotional frailty” Lemieux referenced is in full effect here, in that the
summarized criticism is about the narrow, often commercialized, self-interest
white feminism offers. Much like patriarchy or racism or heterosexism—this
practice is so much bigger than any particular person. This is about an ideology
that gets placated, reinstated, and preserved through systemic action. But it
speaks to white feminism’s sensitivity to shifts in power and in focus that
recognition of those self-interested dynamics is often translated into a personal
attack.
This is the mathematics of how sexism often remains the sole focus and how
even the effort to obtain visibility—not even implement strategies—gets actively
shunned. But putting undocumented women and incarcerated women and
Indigenous women front and center is essential to reordering our resources and
advancing alternative systems. What continues to thwart “feminist” efforts to
incorporate and address the economically insecure is that we refuse to even see
them. We have to start at existence because for a large swath of formal feminist
organizing, many of these women have not existed.
Women’s March, despite its splintering, didn’t default to that. And I hope
that for the continued efforts of the march, the organizers, and its participants, it
never does.
At the heart of choosing one type of oppression as the sole thrust of change is
authority. It’s about maintaining control in times of political upheaval and
preserving a certain hierarchy even as you are throwing some deep protocols out
the window. White feminism has kept true to this practice, but also adapted to
places much more intimate than the national stage. This approach has proved
insidious to some workplace activism, oftentimes when policy changes are
touted as wins for “all women.”
In 2015, a woman named Priya was up against this practice while working in
the data department of a large company. Priya had recently given birth to her
first baby and, like a lot of women in the United States, was trying to figure out
feasible and affordable childcare. She describes her managers as “great,” but
nevertheless a majority-male department with little nuanced understanding of
her scheduling needs. “Many of them had work-at-home wives,” she explains.
Priya’s then-four-month-old daughter was in a private daycare—an expensive
arrangement that she assembled after returning quickly from a standard
maternity leave. But, she soon learned, the daily scramble to get out of the office
and pick up her daughter by 6 p.m., when the daycare closed, was completely
unsustainable. When I interviewed her in the summer of 2019, she recalled all
the details with the incisive clarity of a new parent navigating systems that were
not constructed with caregiving in mind. “I had to leave at 5 o’clock every single
day, and most of the male engineers didn’t really understand that. And so they
would come in whenever they needed to in the morning. Sometimes it would be
like, 10 o’clock, 10:30—not all, but some of them. The meetings could start at 5,
5:30, 6. But for parents who were responsible for the daycare drop-offs and pick-
ups, that was a big deal,” she remembers. “The hustle was getting all my
pumping gear together, getting all my work gear together, rushing out the door
as close to 5 as possible, hoping that the trains would not get congested, and
then try to get to [my daughter’s] daycare before 6 o’clock.”
She considered other arrangements, but they all seemed to re-create the same
scenario. All the daycares near to her home closed at 6 p.m. every day, which
didn’t alleviate her “hustle” scramble. And transporting a newborn on public
transportation during rush hour, to make use of the daycare options closer to
her office, was not feasible. When she consulted her HR department to confirm
if there were any daycare subsidies or discounts, she learned that her company
did indeed have one for a national daycare chain—a standard facility for
corporations. But even with the company’s discount, the cost of the care was still
exorbitantly expensive and for not-good-quality care. “You can’t just put your
kid in a random daycare,” Priya recalls. “It just doesn’t work. You don’t know
the teachers, they don’t know your child.”
The labyrinth Priya describes as she attempts to individually troubleshoot
childcare solutions is common, especially among women of color. Nationally,
they report higher difficulty finding childcare than white mothers.71 Latina and
Native women are twice as likely as white women to not find childcare when in
need. And like Priya, cost and location are the two factors that often leave non-
white women without any options.72 Latinx families in particular are more likely
than white and Black families to live in “childcare deserts”—places where there
are no care facilities available. According to the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, affordable childcare is defined as not exceeding 7 percent of a
household’s income.73 As of 2018, zero states had the cost of center-based infant
or toddler childcare meet the federal definition of “affordable.”74 In fact, in
twelve states, the childcare costs of one infant exceeded the median income by 20
percent.75 Like most structural failures, this reality has been even more
devastating for people of color.76 For the typical Black American family,
childcare costs for two children eats 42 percent of their median income. That’s
six times what the federal government has considered affordable.
The rhythms to this childcare quandary are always the same on a personal
and statistical level: an elaborate timetable of money and accessibility, a
calculative daily exercise in which you’re racing against an entire system that
wasn’t made for you, your child, your family. Every day in which you make it out
at 5:59 p.m., in which the train doors don’t close in your face or the freeway isn’t
congested with traffic, in which you are actually able to slip out of a meeting
early, is a slim win. And one you might very well not be able to repeat the
following day. And many of them don’t. Between lower wages, irregular work
schedules, and childcare challenges, many women cannot work outside the
home, whether full-time or part-time.77
In Priya’s circumstances, she became more reflective about her own
childhood and what had been available to her parents. She began considering
alternative structures.
“I actually went to a cooperative preschool in Michigan in the ’80s so I knew
how that worked,” she says. “I knew that it meant parents doing shifts to kind of
supplement the teachers’ work and to keep costs down for everybody, and also to
have a parent presence in the room. So I benefited from a cooperative preschool
growing up. It also kept my parents, who were state workers, a little more
involved with our early education.” Priya adds that her parents, new immigrants
to the United States with four children, were in a “different financial situation”
than her nuclear family with one child. And yet, a daycare co-op had been
enormously helpful.
Her company’s HR department pointed her toward an in-house women’s
group that often facilitated policy changes within the company, particularly
around gender. Priya tells me that she approached the internal women’s group
to get a sense of their politics around daycare cooperatives. “The immediate
impression was that this was a really good revolutionary idea, and they were all
about it.”
So Priya and another expectant mother put together a proposal for a
company-wide daycare cooperative. “It was a tiered system. It wouldn’t have
been an across-the-board subsidy. It would be based on income. Because I knew
I was making more than some women there, and I knew that I was making quite
a bit less than other women there,” she explains. Priya says her plan also
proposed less spending by the company itself given that the subsidy would be
reflective of what each individual woman made. This initiative would ensure
that all parents, regardless of their income level within the company, could afford
quality childcare.
Priya and her cowriter consulted with HR as well as more senior women
within the company to strengthen the proposal as much as possible. Finally, the
last real stop was obtaining the official endorsement from the women’s group
before formally moving ahead with a policy discussion with the company.
Separately from Priya’s efforts, the women’s group had been advocating for an
extended paid maternity leave policy (at the time, there was no fully paid
parental leave at the company, as Priya had just experienced). The women’s
group resolved to include Priya’s sliding-scale daycare subsidies within the
extended paid parental leave package.
At the same time, Priya began to understand more of the personal
circumstances of the women in the group. Nearly all were white and many were
quite senior in the company, making high-figure salaries. Many of them had
private nannies to watch their children. Childcare was not an issue for them as
high-earning women—and, ultimately, not an issue for the women’s group.
“We learned that they decided at the last second to cut out our whole section
on daycare subsidies because it didn’t fit with their goal,” Priya recalls. The
extended paid maternity leave successfully was pushed through, though—“there
were a lot of accolades and high-fiving and congratulations going around about
the paid maternity leave, which was really cool.” But this is where Priya found
the women’s group goals to be entirely different from what she was trying to
achieve in the first place. “It was a package that was designed, I think, for women
who could comfortably leave the office for four to six months. And when they
returned back from their maternity leave, the majority of them had nannies
anyway. So the short-term goal was satisfied: they got paid to keep women paid
through maternity leave, which is good, which is great. But also, it kind of cut
out the longer-term need for most working parents, which is, OK, if I’m going
to be at the office, how do I afford quality daycare, so it doesn’t have me rushing
back and forth?”
This win, while celebratory, gave the women’s group a “paternalistic” hue in
engaging with other proposals, Priya says. There was constantly “the impression
that they knew best about what the needs of women in general were, but it was
their needs. They were saying, ‘If we get this done this is a victory for all women
here.’ It was almost as if this cohort of women could decide what was best for
the broader set of women. They didn’t really listen to the experiences of people
outside of that women’s group.”
Amidst these criticisms, Priya makes an important clarification: “I do think
the paid maternity leave is a victory, but it was prioritized based on the priorities
of those women, not necessarily the priorities of the broader parent group.”
What this ultimately means, from a top-down perspective, is that sexism and
discrimination is assessed and mobilized against as it’s felt by this predominantly
white, economically comfortable women’s group. And what Priya and her
supporters and cowriter quickly learned was how swiftly their thoughtful
proposals—and urgent needs—were discarded by the one gender-conscious
body within the company.
“I’m not bitter that we didn’t get a daycare subsidy,” Priya adds, who spent a
sizable amount of time outside the office crunching data and figures while
simultaneously caring for a newborn. “I’m upset that we never even got to
participate in the conversation in the first place, even when we were supposedly
part of the group.” She has since moved on to a different company, but the
experience has stayed with her, particularly as she considers influencing
workplace policy with other women. “I’m really reluctant to join any women’s
group now that’s not a women of color–led group. Because [that] one brand of
mainstream feminism really doesn’t work or uplift all women in my experience.
And I can’t waste my time like that again.”

Chapter Seventeen
The First Pillar of Change: Stop Acknowledging Privilege; Fight for Visibility Instead

PRIORITIZING VISIBILITY CANNOT TAKE the shape of one anomalous hire in an
otherwise white, straight, middle-class, cis seascape. Or even two or three, for
that matter.
This is pertinent when evaluating women of color in the workplace. First of
all, it’s important to note that women of color in the United States have always
been “leaning in”—working hard outside the home, oftentimes as the primary
breadwinner, while also raising children and handling the domestic labor. (An
article on female labor participation in the Journal of Economic History
determined that in 1880, Black women not only worked more outside the home
than white women, but they stayed in the workforce longer after marrying.)1
But this relentless work ethic has not led us to equality in the workplace. Far
from it.
A 2006 survey of five large companies in the United States found that women
of color are the most likely to experience harassment on the job compared to all
other marginalized groups.2 Over a decade later, that same data is reported across
a lot of industries: women of color, queer women, and women with disabilities
have significantly worse experiences at work than women overall, according to a
joint 2019 study by McKinsey and LeanIn.org.3 They receive less support from
managers, are less likely to have their work promoted to colleagues, and are less
likely to receive mentoring or be socialized with outside of work.4 For Black
women, for instance, there are several studies that conclude that their statements
and observations at work are remembered less accurately than those of white or
male peers.5 And when they screw up on the job (or the more diplomatic
commit “organizational failure”) they are evaluated more negatively than white
female or male leaders.6 Essentially, women of color go virtually unseen in the
professional world—until they do something wrong.
Another more nuanced look at this landscape dug more intimately into the
workplace dynamics that disadvantage non-white workers. In a review of how
these women and men of color navigate spaces that often result in promotions
and increased recognition, like work happy hours, Harvard Business Review
determined that participants possessed a hesitancy to open up personally to
people they work with, namely the white people they work with.7 I hear a soft
echo of that Cosmopolitan “work-wife” piece in this assessment by one Black
executive suggesting how personal information and dynamics often play out: “I
don’t feel safe sharing information that might later be used against me.”8
Researchers also identified that, “When the conversation turns to workplace
gossip, minority employees say, they may hold back because they lack the
trusting relationships necessary to participate in exchanges that involve discreet
backbiting or criticism of bosses.”9
This distrust is also felt across moments of more traditional work bonding:
over culture, over TV shows, movies, music, shared or presumably shared
interests. But some women of color don’t find these conversations bring them
closer to their colleagues. If anything, it pushes them farther away. One Black
woman told researchers, “How do I jump into the conversation when I often
have no idea what they are talking about? I don’t watch the same TV shows or
the sports they are discussing.”10
I know what she means. I used to work for a white feminist enterprise where
the entire staff was besotted with the show Gilmore Girls and would often get in
lengthy debates about “who Rory [the protagonist] should have ended up with.”
The show had ended about ten years before, but the emotional investment and
attention to detail of the show ran very high and had clearly been a formative
storyline for all of them. But I didn’t grow up worshipping, let alone even
watching, the storyline of a white character (granted, the lead actress, Alexis
Bledel, is Latina, but her character sure isn’t) with a white mom and white
grandparents in a seemingly all-white New England town. So these intense
moments of impromptu professional bonding were completely inaccessible to
me and had a way of always casually casting me on the outside of the beating
heart of the brand, no matter what the metrics of my performance
demonstrated.
The true similarities between me not being able to quote some Gilmore Girls
dialogue and said Black executive saying that she doesn’t know the shows her
colleagues watch are that our coworkers’ interests are valued as the default, the
prioritized, as supported by white supremacy. I could have very well started
talking about The Watermelon Woman in front of them (a movie I nearly know
by heart), but it just doesn’t carry the same weight when the dynamic is reversed.
And on some acute level, both the Black female executive and I know that.
So, women of color go unseen in the workplace. And, not coincidentally, a
foundational premise of white feminism is that unseen labor by women, even
women who are your colleagues, friends, or peers, is essential for you to achieve
financial autonomy and professional recognition.
Utilizing female labor in this way is not only consistent with patriarchy and
capitalism, but also neoliberalism, in which the importance of optimizing the
self and personal resources eclipses structural responsibility. Marçal observes:
There are no workers in neoliberal history. There are only people who
invest in their human capital. Entrepreneurs whose own lives are their
business projects who bear full, sole responsibility for their outcome….
Neoliberalism resolves conflicts between work and capital by simply
turning a person into capital—and her life into a series of investments she
makes in her market value…. It’s a viewpoint that has made us all equal.11
This is how labor rights are eroded. Without “workers,” there is no need for
workers’ rights or employee protections or other hard-and-fast regulations, and
therefore no recognition of that labor. If everyone, women and other
marginalized genders included, are individualized agents or “entrepreneurs” of
their own economical futures, then there are no structural obstructions—only
singular strategies and advancement for solitary success, or personal failures.
Where this often takes on an even more heightened level is in mainstream
celebrity profiles. It’s here that this narrative of an individualized ascension
within a feminist context or landscape is often popularized and where issues of
social justice, activist tendencies, and political ideologies are captured as highly
specified singular radicalisms rather than part of bigger movements. More
tellingly, engagement with gender politics or activism is centered on individual
resolutions, but not structural changes.
This limited understanding of social justice, again, without structural
critique, is also apparent in the practice of singling out specific female celebrities
as “feminist”—something a lot of mainstream outlets were ready to do as
“feminism” became trendy.
In a 2017 piece on Refinery29.com called “Allison Williams Is The Feminist
We Need,” published in conjunction with International Women’s Day, the
actress is asked, “What other steps are you taking to feel empowered and make a
difference?”12 Williams tells the reporter that she advocates for being vigilant
about getting information “from different sources” and also urges readers to
“brush up on our civics.”13 But, from there, she identifies engaging with an
activism that speaks to her personally, invoking a very individualized
comprehension and assessment of social justice:
That’s what I’m focusing on—the activism work that comes from the
heart, the causes that speak to me, the stories that tug at my heartstrings or
seem unfair or un-American in some way. That’s where the work should
go. That’s the magic sauce that creates change.14
Williams’s “magic sauce” comes from engaging with issues that “tug” personally,
revealing a very limited threshold for structural change, particularly given that
Williams identifies herself in the same piece as “disproportionately lucky” in the
context of the activism she participates in:
To say that there has been any moment in my life when I’ve felt
disadvantaged would be incredibly tone-deaf and self-unaware of me. I
have been so fortunate. Have there been instances in which I think maybe
I’ve been treated differently because I’m a woman? Yes—chiefly by the
media. But that word—disadvantaged—is not a word that I can, in good
conscience, apply to myself. I’ve been disproportionately lucky and
privileged, and I intend to spend the rest of my life working off that credit
by giving back and paying it forward.15
That Williams is portrayed by Refinery29 as both literate of the “privileged”
platform she possesses while also continuing to advocate for “causes that speak
to me” reveals the logical blind alley of white feminism. The outlet has collapsed
the responsibilities of social justice and feminism into a single actress, identifying
her literally as “the feminist we need” despite that she shares in the interview that
the scope of the issues she tends to is limited, and neglects to explore who “we”
refers to in the first place. Broadly, the white feminist “we” is a common record
scratch. It’s the place where they tonally and verbally try to broaden their
experiences but are actually signaling to us they are narrow. Like in 2013, when
author and political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter said in a TED Talk, “But 60
years after The Feminine Mystique was published, many women actually have
more choices than men do. We can decide to be a breadwinner, a caregiver, or
any combination of the two.”16 Or when actress, director, and author Lena
Dunham wrote in Vogue in 2017, “Nearly 40 years later, we find ourselves asking
similar questions about our rights that we never thought we’d have to revisit.”17
(Dunham posing that these “questions about our rights” were effectively
resolved echoes the comment made by Whelan to The Cut about her son having
a CEO for a mother and that “it’s just going to be very different.” There’s the
tonal assertion that a collective feminism has already happened, that a gender
revolution has settled the score.)
Both statements speak to profoundly white, middle- to upper-class
experience—where you can easily navigate myriad choices, where you are
imbued with rights you never thought could be taken from you.
But, in 2013, the year Slaughter made those comments, national data revealed
that 17.7 million women were living in poverty.18 And the year before
Dunham’s piece appeared in Vogue, the Guttmacher Institute determined that
four decades of the Hyde Amendment has meant that one in four women on
Medicaid are unable to pursue their constitutionally protected right to an
abortion due to cost.19 But it’s statements like those of both women that
perpetuate a white feminist fantasy of broad-strokes changes, rights, and gender
wins, sometimes to the point of rewriting history and ignoring present realities.
These same dynamics cause the Williams piece to almost turn over on itself.
You have an actress both resisting but, in other moments, embracing an
individualized understanding of feminism.
This narrative is similarly employed in a 2019 profile from Bustle.com titled
“Rachel Brosnahan Is Standing on the Shoulders Of Giants,” signaling the many
women, both in her personal life as well as her industry, that have made her
commercial and professional success possible.20 Yet, when identifying
Brosnahan’s activism, Bustle.com tethers her politics to a narrative of self-
empowerment:
The other part is much bigger than her—it’s the conversations that people
across the country are having “about the ways that we raise young men
versus the ways that we raise young women”, she says, to advocate for
themselves. An outspoken proponent for causes like Time’s Up and social
and political activism (see: her Emmys speech about women using their
voices to vote21), Brosnahan wants the young girls of today to feel as
empowered as she did at their age.22
The reference to differences in how children within the gender binary are raised
does, for a moment, allude to larger cultural and systemic shifts well outside the
personal, as does her encouragement to vote. But the reporting returns this
narrative of activism to the self, capping off both declarations with a mandate to
“advocate for themselves” and to “feel as empowered as she did at their age.”
“Lucky,” a term referenced in Refinery29’s piece on Williams, is once again used
to neutralize any race, class, or heteronormative privileges Brosnahan has
benefited from:
The actor’s teenage self was, she tells me, lucky enough not to feel too
confined by society’s baked-in pressures and demands with regard to her
gender. Ironically, that was because she surrounded herself with men,
from her dad to her brother to the guys on her school’s wrestling team. “I
feel like in a way, because of a lot of the male influences in my life, I missed
some of those things that keep young women taking up less space and
feeling less comfortable taking up space,” Brosnahan says now.23
That Brosnahan is depicted as having inoculated herself against sexism through
“male influences” perpetuates the notion that structural misogyny can be evaded
through personalized efforts and calculations but also by being “lucky.” But
there’s no interrogation as to what “lucky” quantifies. Class, race, cisgenderism,
and heteronormativity go unanalyzed and are effectively factored out of this
representation of activism and feminism.
There’s a reason that words like “luck” or “lucky” are the terms that have
become fluent in white feminist–speak. There’s something very specific that
these words accomplish when framing the same wealthy, conventionally pretty
people we’ve always given the spotlight to. In a study cited in Rachel Sherman’s
book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, researchers have observed, “The
use of ‘luck’ as an explanation for success is significant because it signals an
acknowledgement of the uneven distribution of opportunities at the same time
as overlooking more structural explanations for maldistribution.”24,25
This critical lack of context surrounding identity, effectively dulled by the
shorthand of “luck,” reveals a very specific feminism available to very particular
kinds of women—those seemingly who “luck” finds: white, wealthy, able-
bodied, cisgender, straight, and with a conventional femininity that is culturally
sanctioned. Having gone inward to find their feminism or activism underscores
the lack of structural barriers they encounter, but also, how those same identity-
based barriers serve them.
When it comes to the narrative of my own life, I’ve become more sensitive to
colleagues, family, and friends using this terminology to describe me and my
circumstances: I’ve been “lucky” to work in media within a senior capacity. I’ve
been “lucky” to go to college. I’ve been “lucky” to find multiple jobs to support
myself. Much like those researchers, I see what they are pointing out. But I’ve
made the effort to reframe these assessments so that they more accurately depict
how I exist in this system.
I’m not “lucky” to have held senior roles, I’m light-skinned. I’m cisgender.
I’m conventionally feminine in a way that is constantly culturally affirmed. I’m
thin and able-bodied and always have been. I’m not “lucky” to have gone to
college. I’m from a middle-class home. I was raised by people who talked to me
about books, which we had in the home in the first place, and who had the time
and resources to engage with me about them. When you line up all these factors,
you’re not looking at random good fortune. You’re looking at the mathematics
of privilege and how these distinct advantages have destinies in our America.
It doesn’t mean I didn’t “work hard”—a weird space that I often find
privileged people think is what privilege eradicates. But it does mean that I had
the opportunity to work hard in the first place. To be let in the room. To be
given the confidence and trust from my employers and other institutional
guardians that I could accomplish these tasks and objectives exceedingly well.
And many people who have intense work ethics and brilliant assessments of
culture, politics, and policy don’t get these opportunities because they don’t
look or speak like I do.
I’ve gotten a lot more out of public acknowledgments of privilege when they
are followed by critiques and explorations of those exact barriers. When that
recognition then facilitates structural changes. I’m white and I resent that
everyone else at this table is too; how can we access more networks of women of color?
I’m straight and I think that’s a problem for leadership given that we are
designating coverage for many women’s lives; does anyone know any queer literate
women who could take on this project for additional pay?
When you open a statement about being white, about being cis, and about
being a citizen, that should be the beginning—not the end.

Chapter Eighteen
The Second Pillar of Change: Fighting the Systems That Hold Marginalized Genders Back

AFTER INCREASING VISIBILITY, THE next action many women need is the basic
ability to feed and nourish their bodies. Hunger is disproportionally experienced
by women: one in nine Americans lived in a food-insecure household in 20181
and households composed of a single woman either with or without children
were “significantly” more likely to be food insecure.2 (By contrast, single-parent,
male-headed households are less likely to be food insecure.)
This reality is the result of a multifaceted attack on women: domestic
violence, gender discrimination, lack of paid leave, and the wage gap, among
other things.3 And yet, their vast intersection manifesting as literal hunger is not
popularly presented as a “women’s issue.” Going hungry because of structural
and systemic racist misogyny is not cited within white feminism as a prominent
risk factor. But poverty endures as one of the longest-running symptoms of
patriarchy.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, it became
apparent quite quickly who a lot of our protections were explicitly not made for:
poor people. Calls for increased hand-washing don’t mean anything if your
home doesn’t even have safe or clean water. Societal encouragement from
influencers to stay home assumes you have one and that it’s safe to be in.
When shelter-in-place mandates started dotting the nation and businesses
closed, calls for Americans to stay at home were aptly clarified as a “white-collar
quarantine” by Howard Barbanel, a wine company owner in Miami. He told
reporters, “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving
trucks, working for local government.”4 The coronavirus infection and fatality
rates soon bore that out by race: In New York City, deaths from the virus for
Black and Latinx people were twice that of whites.5 In Chicago, where Black
people account for just one-third of the population, they accounted for 72
percent of virus-related fatalities.6
Nationally, though, the data was veering toward the inevitable gender
breakdown. When the Department of Homeland Security identified the
essential workers critical to maintaining daily life, most of the roles were held by
women.7 And when you factored in both gender and race, non-white women
were more likely to be performing essential labor than anyone else.
At the time, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York City said numbers like
these underscored two enduring realities: poorer people suffer more often from
chronic health conditions, which makes contracting the virus lethal, and more
people of color “don’t have a choice, frankly, but to go out there every day and
drive the bus and drive the train and show up for work and wind up subjecting
themselves to, in this case, the virus.”8
But why do more poor people have chronic health issues? Because they have
limited access to preventative healthcare9 like screenings, medications, and tests.
They are frequently uninsured and put off care because they can’t afford it,
meaning what could have been treated early—and often is, for higher-income
people—develops into a full-blown condition by the time they reach an ER,
assuming they are even admitted and don’t die before getting care.10
Lack of paid leave quickly bridges into Cuomo’s second observation, in that
these are households that are living hand to mouth anyway—their jobs are not
protected because they are deemed very easily replaceable and interchangeable.
And unlike middle-class professions where workers can work from home, these
circumstances do not change in a pandemic.
Our policies, lack of societal infrastructure, and wealth distribution were
shortening life expectancy in these communities even before COVID-19. The
virus just sped up the timeline by which we rely on and use the bodies of poor
people to do our most critical labor and then discard them.
Prominent companies in the United States evidenced this quickly during the
pandemic. Amazon prioritized profits over workers’ rights very clearly when,
despite broad social-distancing measures, the corporation announced a hiring of
one hundred thousand more workers to fill increased demand for orders.11 As
workers got sick in warehouses, they had to advocate for masks, sick days, and
job protection. But even after walkouts by employees to protest unsafe measures,
Amazon’s “unlimited” unpaid time off and two weeks’ paid sick leave for
workers who test positive for COVID-19 weren’t actually preventative.
(Amazon declined to comment on the walkouts in April of 2020 and CNBC
noted that “in the past, the company has downplayed the walkouts, saying only a
small percentage of workers at the facilities participated in the protests and there
was no disruption to operations.”)12 If unlimited time off is unpaid, you come
back to work when you run out of money, obviously, and coronavirus testing
was evasive and inaccessible to many.13 (In July of 2020, Amazon published a
blog post detailing efforts to protect both workers and customers from COVID-
19, which included distributing personal protective equipment to employees,
150 process updates that included cleaning and social distancing, and investing
$4 billion dollars in “COVID-related initiatives,” among other measures.)14
Trader Joe’s followed a similar point of contention with workers who had,
pre-pandemic, been coordinating to unionize. The chain reportedly sent memos
to store managers encouraging that they dissuade employees from unionizing,
specifically during team meetings. A Trader Joe’s spokesperson told the New
York Times that the company has “the right to express our opinion to crew
members about the pros and cons of possible unionization.”15 As the virus
escalated, the market chain offered bonuses for workers who put in hours during
the pandemic and was inconsistent in safety measures; some locations reportedly
banned masks and gloves, as they were frightening customers.16 (In April 2020,
the company said they would provide masks within stores.) Whole Foods (which
is owned by Amazon) proved no better, keeping locations open after workers
tested positive for the virus with “additional deep cleaning and sanitation” and
implementing two-week paid leave that didn’t sufficiently address the economic
disparities and devastation of the illness. “The majority of the people who work
at Whole Foods live paycheck to paycheck,” one mother told KQED with regard
to her son, who was working amidst the pandemic.17 “If they became ill, two
weeks of pay is not going to cover it. Many of them would be facing bankruptcy
and worse.”
A Whole Foods spokesperson told KQED that the company was following
guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health
and food safety officials. They told the outlet that they had begun paying
workers $2 more per hour, introduced a relaxed worker attendance policy, and
increased sanitation practices. But Whole Worker, an “advocacy group” that was
helping Whole Foods workers unionize, didn’t believe these efforts were enough
to protect employees. Whole Worker advocated a national “sickout” in March to
demand double wages (essentially hazard pay) during the crisis, immediate
shutdown of any store where an employee tested positive, and paid leave for
workers who were self-quarantining.18
The hierarchy I consistently see here is money above human life, just as Rose
Schneiderman publicly explained a hundred years earlier after she had lost
friends in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. And because domestic labor does not yield
profits, the majority of institutions and companies prioritized profits over
childcare needs.
For middle-class and upper-class families, their entire system of labor quickly
disintegrated when other people could not come to their home and they could
not leave. For women who worked outside the home, they found themselves
feeling “like I have five jobs,” as Sarah Joyce Willey, a mother of two, told the
New York Times.19 With children transitioning to remote learning, professional
tasks looming, homes that were being lived in 24/7, and food that needed to be
prepared to constantly feed everyone, it became clear that “women” was still the
economists’ jar we had assigned infinite labor and nurturing to—and without
any government support.
In the spring of 2020, as white-collar mothers barricaded themselves in
makeshift bathroom offices and took business calls in their car, you heard even
partnered, economically secure women quietly wondering where white
feminism was.
“What I promised my daughters isn’t something I can deliver and that’s such
a painful thing to consider,” Saba Lurie, a mother with a private psychotherapy
practice, told reporters.20 “The way we’ve been able to MacGyver a career as a
woman is completely under attack by a global pandemic,” Candace Valenzuela, a
Democratic congressional candidate from Texas, told the Times of all the
cobbled together strategies that have made the professional advancement of
some women possible.21 That’s because white feminism wasn’t made for this
real life with real challenges and very real barriers to economic stability; it’s an
aspirational fantasy.
Not surprisingly, even in the early days of the pandemic, women reported in a
national survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation that they were more worried
about the effects of the crisis than men.22 Even though men were suffering more
fatalities from COVID-19 and projected to be more at risk,23 women reported
higher concerns about the virus infecting someone in their family, savings being
affected, losing income, not being able to afford treatment or testing, and
putting themselves at risk because they could not afford to miss work.24
What all this preliminary data underscored was an enduring, pre-pandemic
reality in which women are more worried about their economic security than
men anyway. And people getting sick, needing care, not being able to work
outside the home, or going to work while being sick is a landscape American
women constantly navigate, well before COVID-19 tanked the economy: one in
four women who work outside the home go back to work two weeks after giving
birth,25 women are more likely to live in poverty than men,26 and women are less
able to save for retirement or emergencies.27
But unlike a more standardized news cycle, in which the culprit could be an
industry that systemically disadvantages women, or a powerful leader refusing to
hire them, or an influential predator who endangers them, the coronavirus
pandemic demonstrated that it was all these shoddy systems that were to blame:
healthcare, lack of affordable housing, lack of childcare and paid leave, prison
conditions, and protections for essential workers. There was no isolated field
that was making the health crisis untenable and, at its worst, fatal. It was the
elaborate avenues to basic living that we had constructed, voted on, lobbied for,
and culturally sanctioned. And it always has been.
The matrix of policy that keeps marginalized genders, people of color, and
poor people in unsafe conditions for little money with no job security or
healthcare is much more sprawling than one single boss who delicately says she
would prefer not to hire a single mother. But keeping our villains to a single
Harvey Weinstein or even the single tech industry accomplishes another falter.
It falsely casts the single hero.
Can’t “Good Women” Just Take Over?
In season one of the television show The L Word: Generation Q, a plotline
develops in which one of the main characters, Bette Porter, a Black lesbian,
throws her political campaign into question. As two members of her political
staff weigh the scandal that might compromise her campaign, one of them
proclaims, “I’m a trans man and seeing someone like Bette Porter become mayor
means that people like me might live a better life. I mean, she was supposed to be
the one to pave the way so that someone like me could be in charge someday.”28
When feminism became an acceptable topic of mainstream cultural
conversation, many myths followed. In conjunction with the two-dimensional
idea that earning a ton of money and becoming a ruthless, self-interested
capitalist was a patented feminist endeavor came another distortion: that one
person will change everything. A prominent and satiating myth of white
feminism is that putting a single woman, woman of color, queer person,
transgender person in a particular senior position will, without question,
transform an entire organization, institution, corporation, or franchise.
You see this a lot with enterprises that are traditionally cis male and white,
like this 2019 Time article about the new CEO of the USA Gymnastics, “Can
Anyone Save the Scandal-Plagued USA Gymnastics? Li Li Leung Is Determined
to Try”29 or the framing for this 2019 New York Times piece headlined, “Can
‘Captain Marvel’ Fix Marvel’s Woman Problem?”30 with a big picture of actress
Brie Larson as superhero Captain Marvel. While the actual article details
multiple efforts within Marvel Comics to make female characters more
prominent and less sexually objectified, the framing for the piece suggests that a
single film and character—namely Larson—will overhaul a little under a century
of misogyny.
Much like more capitalist approaches to “feminism” that put FEMINIST AF
on a keychain, this Marvel positioning feels good. It feels manageable. It feels
proactive. And it satisfies something deeply enduring about living under systems
that feel perpetually oppressive and powerful. The script of a single person
swooping in and knocking away the cobwebs of sexism with a flexing arm emoji
appeases this deep need for change. But these narratives also perform a great
disservice in capturing the scope of sexism and how we envision solutions by
signaling to us that one person can solve it.
There are a lot of dynamics being collapsed here. The current media climate,
both in women’s media and beyond, supports this, often by putting bold,
headlining credit to the first woman of color or queer woman hired to fulfill a
certain leadership role, whether in politics or companies. Beyond media
interpretations, sometimes this framing comes directly from the enterprise itself,
like when the Recording Academy proudly announced then new president and
CEO Deborah Dugan in 2019 as the first woman to hold the position.31 Or
when Deloitte, a prominent audit and consulting firm, declared their first female
CEO in 2015, Cathy Engelbert.32 But this strategy is often a deflection to
prevent actual structural change by playing more to optics—especially in the
Instagram age. This idea that change will be embodied in one woman also serves
to protect the structure as is.
I’ve encountered this strategy on a one-on-one level in both reporting and
editing stories on racism or sexism in culture. The response, like clockwork,
from the subject being, But we have a woman of color who runs our PR
department. But we have a woman of color on our board. But we have a woman of
color overseeing this product. And this is where, you can tell, understanding of
these societal forces is only skin deep—or that only external changes are
approved. They think having hired one woman to hold this position or take on
that project means they are immune to these criticisms. What I often hear them
saying is, But we did the thing we were supposed to! We checked this off our list! But
this is where ideology is ultimately more important to identify rather than
anomalous hires. What does it matter if you have a woman of color running this
company if she is advancing a white feminist ideology? Her being a CEO isn’t
going to change the fact that her business model relies on exploitatively low
wages of freelancers. But the white feminist narrative is that it will.
Women and nonbinary people taking these jobs is essential. Moving into
these roles, these spaces, these industries, these VIP meetings where the key
dynamics of our resources are being discussed and cultural conversations are
happening is a worthy goal. But, like I tell the young people I mentor, you need
to always accept these roles with the critical understanding that you’re working
in a racist structure. You securing the job alone will not be The Change, as much
as it has taken you to get there—that’s just what the people who hired you think.
They think that just by having you, accepting you, and extending roles to you,
they are done. What they often don’t know is that they’re just getting started.
If you actually want to make impactful changes for others like you or others
explicitly not like you, you’re better equipped to orient yourself against systems
rather than individual people. Think in terms of policies, not managers. Think
in terms of assembling and establishing a group with other colleagues rather
than going up against leadership by yourself. Think in terms of precedents that
you can formally set for the people coming up after you and that would be
virtually unthinkable to the people who came up before you.
As someone who wanted and achieved quite a few senior roles in media, I’ve
navigated this many times. I knew I wanted to be powerful enough to dictate the
coverage I thought mattered and to address the mythologies that so often
dominate women’s lives. But once I had power, I wasn’t willing to exploit others
to maintain it, even when I was directly or indirectly pressured to. Because it’s
simply the way things have always been done, because it’s “protocol,” because
that’s what that team or staff member is there for, because that’s how we were
treated when we were junior employees or freelancers or part-timers.
I used the influence I had to change the expectations of the teams I managed
and the content we created, whether it was neglected raises for some, title
changes for others, longer parental leave for new parents, or to showcase a staff
member’s often-unseen strengths. Beyond diversifying staffs, I sometimes even
pushed for a re-interrogation of what a successful metric was, allowing more
people to be recognized by the meritocracy framework of corporate America.
You avoid becoming the next generation of white feminism by incorporating
the points of view that this ideology does not account for. Assume all
professional roles of power and influence with an awareness of what you can set
into motion for others, specifically for people you’ll never meet. A significant
downside of senior roles in institutions and companies is that you are often
taken further and further away from the most junior and entry-level people who
often need and are neglected the most. What policies are you now in a position
to change to benefit people who were originally not considered? Parents? Trans
people? Women over 50? What resources have not been provided for some
departments or teams because their leadership is “nontraditional”? How can you
tweak performance metrics so that people who are overlooked by the company
can be seen and rewarded? What can you omit from job descriptions and
qualifications to permit entry for other people? Striking a college education as a
requirement? An arbitrary number of years of experience?
At one of my senior media roles, I was presented with a young assistant on
my first day. I had never had an assistant before and, as of this role, was
embarking on managing a huge digital team. Even though I was new, I could see
that my assistant was being squandered with the way the work culture was set:
she was supposed to manage my business expenses, my schedule, and wade
through the endless mountains of literal paperwork that my role was considered
“too senior” to handle directly. When I spoke with her, she expressed wanting to
eventually have a role like mine—managing editorial websites and working more
in online strategy. She demonstrated good instincts for it and the more we
worked together, the more I could see that she had sharp observations about
what flourished on the internet and what ultimately didn’t. In her very limited
role, she was a wasted resource, both to the company and to me. I grew up on
the internet. But, at ten years younger than me, she literally grew up on the
internet and had a very intuitive understanding of the platform we ran as well as
social platforms.
When I assessed this new job with the very specific resources I had been
allotted and the team I had inherited, I saw that I didn’t need an assistant in the
traditional sense. I needed someone to help me run this online juggernaut.
I started cc’ing her on more high-level emails and encouraging her to
participate in these conversations where we were finalizing certain strategies.
That’s when we encountered a blockade together. My outlet had a company
culture policy that assistants were not permitted in certain senior meetings.
(While presented as a confidentiality issue, I found this to be bizarre reasoning.
If we ultimately don’t trust her, then why does she have a company credit card in
my name? She was across all kinds of “sensitive” information just by me
forwarding her certain emails. To me, it ultimately seemed more like a way to
maintain a very specific hierarchy rather than protect information.)
So, I started to strategize ways around this arbitrary hierarchy. I coordinated
with another colleague to have my assistant promoted into a different role in
which I would still manage her, but she would have more formal responsibilities
to do with the website. We were able to pull this off because I was still new
enough to push for unprecedented resources or changes and obtain them as the
shiny new person. (Once that wears off, I find bosses and management teams are
less likely to go for novel ideas for restructuring.) I’m also really convincing
when it comes to advocating for young people’s careers.
With “assistant” formally dropped from her title, I marched her straight into
those coveted senior meetings with me. Sometimes, depending on the demands
of my schedule, I would ask that she attend in my place.
I sent two very strong messages with this maneuver: 1.) this young woman
belongs in these important logistical discussions, and 2.) she is someone to watch
when determining the future of this brand.
I also successfully used the power proportionate to my role (remember, I still
needed to get more senior approval for this) to advocate for someone who was
overlooked by the company power structure because she was young and a
woman.
That’s what power should be used for: to open avenues and resources and
opportunities for others and to encourage the changes they bring, not mandate
that they parrot back the status quo. Not ordering young women to bring me
cappuccinos and salads while I tweet about “feminism.”
In white-collar settings, there’s a lot of hidden authority within the words
“subject to manager approval.” These are places where there are not formal
policies in place but are assessed per whatever the manager deems appropriate for
performance. In places where I couldn’t get a formal policy change through, I
often used these four words to normalize and compensate for what I thought
should be a policy. For the people I managed and the landscapes that were my
responsibilities, they would be.
What this often meant in practice is that I was able to buffer for the systems
that execute sexist or classist working conditions. If someone on my team
recently had a child, then of course they can on-ramp remotely from home
before coming back to the office—they need a while, way longer than those
paltry twelve weeks, to recover from childbirth and get their care options in
order. And our company and government aren’t going to step in for her or
them, so I will. The same goes if they have older children and need to leave
earlier to collect them from school or do the essential labor of feeding them,
bathing them, and doing their homework with them. Or of being caregivers to
aging parents or special-needs family members. Can they log on earlier in the
day? Can we assemble a hybrid schedule where they make up the hours on a
weekend or special coverage or take on other duties?
I’ve helped people with debilitating anxiety develop alternate work schedules;
I’ve given different tasks to people struggling with depression; I’ve advocated for
people who have grappled with loss, grief, and trauma to have extended time off,
beyond standard company policy.
Where ableism and racism have shaped the foundational tenets of commerce
and productivity, it’s on the powerful to be innovative. That’s where we show
up and control for those forces with our ability to understand the aptitude of
our team, reassembling them beyond the rigid formulas that misogyny has
standardized.
If you are in a position of power and you are not doing this, then what are
you doing?
The performative nature of a “diversity hire,” as they are often described by the
people who choose them, often muffles the many-layered reality of power. As
powerful as these roles sometimes are—first female CEO, first Black editor in
chief, first Native American senator, first trans tenured professor—their
influence will nevertheless be proportional to that role. They will exist in a
system that is already composed of constellations of power: colleagues, board
members, constituents, teams, and other roles. Which isn’t to say they won’t
enact change: policies, hires, budgets, different systems, and approaches. The
candidate may deviate from the traditional cohort, but they will ultimately be
up against it, depending on their ideology. As we learned from the makers of the
perpetually disastrous Grammy Awards.
When the Recording Academy appointed Deborah Dugan to be CEO and
president in 2019, it was a historic appointment. She was the first female
president since the academy was formalized in 1957.33 Dugan’s hire also notably
came after the academy had been under increased scrutiny for lack of gender
inclusion and diversity (a 2018 study confirmed that of six hundred songs from
the Billboard Hot 100 list over five years, female songwriters ran a mere 12
percent; male producers outnumbered female producers forty-nine to one; and
96 percent of pop songs that can include dozens of producers did not have a
single female credit).34 Academy organizers responded with a statement saying
that the board “takes gender parity and inclusion very seriously” and that they
were assigning an internal task force “to review every aspect of what we do to
ensure that our commitment to diversity is reflected.”35
Shortly after her hire was announced, Dugan was asked by Variety how much
the Recording Academy planned to address racial and gender biases within the
music industry. “That’s one of the questions I’m most excited to answer in this
job,” she said.36
The following year, we learned that answer: the academy had placed Dugan
on administrative leave.
Dugan claimed that she was put on leave for “misconduct” three weeks after
sending an email to HR detailing allegations of voting irregularities within the
academy’s nomination process, conflicts of interest, self-dealing, financial
mismanagement, and sexual harassment. Essentially and arguably, what she was
hired to do. The academy responded by telling CNN that Dugan created a
“‘toxic and intolerable’ work environment and engaged in ‘abusive and bullying
conduct.’”37 Dugan later filed a lawsuit with the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) asserting that she was wrongfully fired after
raising concerns about voting practices and sexual harassment, as a retaliatory
measure. Dugan’s attorneys said that the academy had offered Dugan “millions
of dollars to drop all of this and leave the Academy” but when she refused to
accept that offer, within the hour, no less, she was placed on leave.38 The lawsuit
remains ongoing and Dugan was formally fired.
She later said in a statement, “I was recruited and hired by the Recording
Academy to make positive change; unfortunately, I was not able to do that as its
CEO. So, instead of trying to reform the corrupt institution from within, I will
continue to work to hold accountable those who continue to self-deal, taint the
Grammy voting process and discriminate against women and people of color.”39
And that’s often the context that is not accounted for in gauzy
announcements that conflate progress with a single person: it effectively
downplays how complex, far-reaching, and solidly baked in these mindsets are to
the infrastructure of companies or institutions. This isn’t just a matter of
“rebranding” or doing away with a few key people who hate women or won’t
hire people whose résumés don’t look a certain way. This is the challenging of
ideologies—of ways of seeing people. And to that end, it will take a lot more
than one person—a new president or CEO or sole actor—solving the sexism of a
particular entity. As is consistent with the history of social justice, it will take
many of us, either within these industries or outside of them, to effectively refuse
to move forward under the status quo.
The glowing and revolutionary “First Woman to Run This Company”
template often serves as the red herring of social justice efforts—an easy, strictly
visual way to both negate criticism of systemic racism or sexism and to position
themselves as forward-thinking without compromising business as usual. We
saw this on a mass scale a year post-#MeToo.
Following allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment against just over
two hundred prominent men across industries, about half were promptly
replaced by women.40 These female candidates had to fill in a wealth of roles—
and fast: one-third were in news media, one-quarter in government, and one-
fifth in entertainment and the arts.
One of these hires, Tanzina Vega, who replaced host John Hockenberry on
WNYC’s The Takeaway and who has interviewed me on air, noted to the New
York Times that many women had been ready for these important roles for some
time regardless of the circumstances that led to that professional recognition. “A
bunch of us who took over these jobs got promoted because we were really good
at these jobs,” the radio host said in 2018. “We have the skills, we have the
experience, we have the work ethic and we have the smarts to do it, and it’s time
for us to do this job.”41
Still, that isn’t to say that these companies and institutions view these highly
competent and experienced hires this way. The fact that a bouquet of industries
were in turmoil and female hires were called in en masse was very telling of the
conversations happening behind closed doors among boards and senior
leadership, particularly as investigations were actively ongoing into systemic
sexism.
But the tendency to turn to women and people of color in times of crisis
predates the massive uprising that was #MeToo. Researchers from Utah State
University determined in 2013 that Fortune 500 companies are much more
likely to place women and minorities—framed as “non-traditional CEOs”—into
top leadership positions in times of crisis.42 These findings, gleaned from fifteen
years of data,43 were effectively two-pronged: 1.) cis-white-guy CEOs view these
flailing companies as too risky and pass, and 2.) women and minorities view this
at-risk company as their one chance at leadership and take the role because they
are correctly intuiting that an offer like this probably won’t come around to
them again. Female candidates specifically are also viewed as inherently “having
the upbeat nature and warmth necessary to motivate employees and pull a high-
risk company through,” according to The Guardian’s reporting on the study.44
The researchers noted, though, that what usually happens is the “non-
traditional CEO” is given a shorter tenure than would be afforded to a white
male CEO to turn around an entire company, culture, and profits that are
quickly going into the red. When she does not accomplish this, because of these
dooming metrics, she is fired and a “traditional CEO” is brought in. Researchers
call this “the savior effect.” “She’s replaced by a man, a mark of a return to the
status quo,” Vox explains.45 The original candidate’s inability to ascend beyond
the framed “failure” of that one influential role is known as “the glass cliff.”
Carol Bartz, a former CEO of Yahoo! and Autodesk, said on the
Freakonomics podcast in 2018 that these anomalous hires do not signal
ideological changes or recognition of the capabilities of women broadly.46
“Listen, it is absolutely true that women have a better chance to get a
directorship or a senior position if there’s trouble.”47 She encourages that
women take these roles anyway, but clarifies what is actually happening when
she does. “It’s not that all of a sudden the boards wake up and say, ‘Oh, there
should be a female here.’ They do that sometimes because it’s easier to hide
behind, ‘Well, of course. Of course that failed, because it was female. What could
we have been thinking?’ ”48
Bartz would know. She was fired after two and a half years when Yahoo! failed
to grow.49 She was replaced by Scott Thompson, a white guy.50 He left five
months later after he allegedly falsified his résumé for the job. Thompson, as well
as his lawyer, declined to comment to the New York Times after this was
reported.51
White feminism thrives in the laudatory style of a lot of these announcements
accomplishing PR for otherwise racist or sexist institutions without them really
having to change too much. And worse still, this framing lards these institutions
with credit for something they haven’t even accomplished yet.
This ideology often capitalizes on this narrative to their advantage, co-opting
radical language to tell their own stories of success, as do the institutions they
work for. White feminism is generally on board with this cosmetic execution of
patriarchy-busting because this practice has a very singular and individualized
understanding of power anyway. The values and comprehension of what gender
parity even is squares. It’s also unabashedly individualistic.
The idea that radical change will come one woman at a time, in a nice corner
office, in a leadership role, in a woman with a sharp red lip and a severe heel, is
also where white feminism overlaps with white supremacy. This approach makes
it okay, even celebratory, to hinge all your energies and hopes for social justice on
a young female CEO who doesn’t push for decent healthcare benefits. It makes
it sufficient that she only acts with her own job performance and product
metrics, and exploits the underpaid, overextended work of everyone else in the
company to get there. It makes it fine that she relies on a steady stream of
immigrant nannies so that she can do this work.
Because change will come one woman at a time. We support feminism by
supporting the singularity of her.
It sanctions and protects this self-interested white feminist factory by
assuring us that these CEOs and editors and entrepreneurs are embodying
revolution by remaining self-interested. Their scope can be limited to
themselves. It also mimics the tiered approach of white and white-aspiring
women coming first, while women of color, poor women, immigrant women
can come after. General Motors, which hired Mary Barra as its first female
CEO52 and was the first woman to run a major automaker in the United States,
boldly proclaims that women comprise 45 percent of their board of directors in
their “Diversity and Inclusion Report.”53 But, in 2019, multiple Black GM
employees filed a lawsuit against the company alleging that when colleagues
started hanging nooses in the bathrooms and they encountered “whites only”
scrawls on the walls, they were told to handle the racial harassment themselves.54
(GM told CNN that they had closed the plant for the day and held a mandatory
meeting. In a statement, they said, “We treat any reported incident with
sensitivity and urgency, and are committed to providing an environment that is
safe, open, and inclusive. General Motors is taking this matter seriously and
addressing it through the appropriate court process.)55 And it’s not like former
Pepsi CEO, Indra Nooyi, the “most prominent woman to lead a Fortune 500
company,”56 inoculated the company against trivializing Black Lives Matter in
their ill-conceived Kendall Jenner ad.57 (In 2017, the company tweeted a public
apology with a graphic that read, “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of
unity, peace, and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark, and we
apologize.”)58 It’s “trickle-down economics” for feminism, in which rich people
being rich is somehow good for the economy as a whole. But white feminists
being white feminists isn’t impactful for collective gender rights, even if it’s
impactful for business.
The change-will-come-one-woman-at-a-time approach makes us complacent.
It encourages us to settle for whiteness. It encourages us, frankly, to settle.
Where I’ve seen a deviation from this are the moments when layers of
institutionalized power are revealed. When public figures, who are often crafted
to represent these organizations, step outside this role and critique them too.
After former USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar was
accused of abusing and assaulting hundreds of underage athletes, that’s exactly
what happened. In 2019 when USA Gymnastics announced new CEO and
president Li Li Leung, five-time Olympic medalist Simone Biles didn’t just
respond with a fist-pumping press release about the organization hiring their
first Asian American woman CEO. When Leung released a formal apology to
the many athletes who were abused, Biles raised the bar. As a survivor of Nassar’s
abuse and a dedicated Olympian who has been the face of the U.S. Olympics,
she told the Today show, “I feel like you can always talk the talk, but you have to
show up and you have to prove…. It would almost be better if you just proved to
everyone rather than talking, because talking is easy.”59
The demand for more than press releases heightens the literacy of this
dialogue as well as the focus on preventative measures. It establishes that a public
apology that everyone can read and retweet and “like” is not enough. This
apology after more than three hundred reported victims have come forward does
not absolve the organization of responsibility for facilitating abuse on such a
sweeping scale.60
This response expands on a comment Biles made earlier while training in
Kansas City that same year.61 She took down the wall—exposing the
infrastructure of her role—by revealing how she has to operate after Nassar’s
trial and conviction. “It’s hard coming here for an organization and having had
them fail us so many times,” she said. What is so powerful about this phrasing is
that she is actively holding USA Gymnastics accountable for that failure while
also acknowledging how trying it is to represent them. These are two
simultaneous realities, and in many ways, they depend on each other.
Biles further underscored how complex her relationship is to her employer by
explaining how she functions within the organization—and how exploitation
flourished while trust was abused. “We’ve done everything that they’ve asked us
for even when we didn’t want to. And they couldn’t do one damn job. You had
one job. You literally had one job and you couldn’t protect us.”62
Within these two statements, Biles is refusing to erase the organization’s
failures with her face. She is refusing to optically rebrand the institution. And
she is also refusing the assumption that change will be embodied in this one new
CEO.
She is pushing for something much bigger. She’s suggesting an urgency for
change that vastly exceeds the capability of even one very powerful person. She’s
implying that we need a movement that mobilizes and prioritizes all of us.
Pornographic actress and writer Stoya made a similar point in an interview
with Jezebel in 2018, telling reporter Tracy Clark-Flory, “I am so tired of being
asked about feminism in porn!”63 She alludes to the varying systems and
“structural problems” that dictate a woman’s life and an ability to create one,
which does include the pornographic industry. The question of being a feminist
in porn, whatever that means to a variety of interpretations, is complicated by
what drives, sustains, and sires any industry: money. Women needing it and
other people trying to make it, with bodies, desire, performance, consent,
workplace conditions, and the ability to work again, connecting those two
constants. To this assessment, being a feminist in porn, as a singular person, is a
moot question. Because it’s ultimately the structures that dictate women’s lives,
health, and economic stability.
“I’ve always tried to be very clear about my work not being feminist,” Stoya
said. “The only thing that can be remotely considered feminist is, like, a woman
going to work, being paid a decent wage, and having a life under capitalism. But
anything other than that is a bit of a stretch, and also a disservice to the actual
feminist pornographers. There is definitely a lot of focus in my work on the state
of sex work, and the history of it, and there’s aiming towards human connection
and an accurate portrayal of human sexuality, but it’s not feminist.”64
The place where feminist, “feminist,” or feministTM efforts differentiate in
this space, though, is that activism generally compromises business by asserting
the value of life—it doesn’t necessarily try to fit into it.
To that end, it’s often the initiatives that are “bad” for conventional business
that have the capacity to help people: a dent in profits to fund higher wages to
reflect the cost of living and paid leave. Disability accommodations that don’t
track with standard productivity metrics. In short, corporations would make less
money. Not make the number one slot on the Fortune 500 list for six years in a
row65 and then allegedly discriminate against pregnant workers,66 like Walmart
reportedly did. (After reaching a $14 million settlement with 4,000 women, a
Walmart spokesperson denied any wrongdoing to the Washington Post and said,
“Walmart has had a strong policy against discrimination in place for many years
and we continue to be a great place for women to work and advance.”)67
But if companies and individuals really wanted to improve women’s lives,
you would see it in a different way: they would promote and incentivize
structural changes and the entities that keep power in check.
If companies for marginalized genders wanted to empower women, they
would encourage a union that protects the workers who make that enterprise a
daily reality, not just tweet out once on Equal Pay Day. They would encourage
the workers to approach management with collective bargaining and collaborate
on terms that were agreeable, feasible, and sustainable. Instead, Amanda Hess
reports in the New York Times Magazine that twenty-six past and present
employees at The Wing have watched their working conditions fracture in the
name of “feminism”: late pay, racial harassment, and pressure to keep criticism
of the brand to themselves.68 (The Wing spokeswoman told the magazine that
they have “maintained employment practices” and “As in any workplace,
employees receive feedback and ways to improve.”)69 Instead, I’m counseling
junior staff on how to negotiate for raises that they were terrified to ask for,
despite the lengthy in-house content on celebrating professional women.
If you’ve looked back through the trajectory of a lot of media, though, this
timeline is entirely unsurprising. Platforms that were once deemed unknown,
exciting, and even slightly transgressive have eventually been co-opted into a
boring version of what they once were in an effort to make money: see
magazines, digital media, television, radio, the telephone, and, of course, social
media.
What’s revealing, though, about a lot of activism that addressed social
inequity is that it gravitated toward what no one wanted to outright say—and
when they did, big efforts and physical force were called in to suppress it. That’s
why when Littlefeather exited the Academy Awards stage, actor John Wayne had
to be restrained by six security guards.70 He wanted to shut her up. That’s
ultimately why the police were called for Davis’s study groups. They don’t want
kids calling attention to how stupid segregation is. And that’s what needs to be
preserved.
For us, now, as we make use of post-corporate social media to activate rather
than brand, the incentive is counter to how companies view it and what the
desirable metrics are. The question then becomes: What would be the message
or voice that you could use that may not get a lot of Instagram likes? What
exceeds the now-accepted use of Twitter? If the cultural premium is now who is
the most “liked,” what is the thing no one wants to hear or engage with?
Blatant racism and fat-shaming aside, what observation could you digitally
share right now that would get you fired? That all the women in leadership don’t
have children? That no woman has stayed at the company long after having a
child? That all the women who get promoted seem to be white?
What could you share that would get you alienated in your immediate
community? That your neighborhood only has charter schools? That the PTA
seems more invested in keeping brown children out and resources for white kids
in?
That’s where online activism can stem from. The things you say and build
visibility around that would get you in trouble.

Chapter Nineteen
The Third Pillar of Change: Hold Women

Accountable for Abuse
IN 2018, I WAS asked to speak on a panel about reporting and gender at a
university, aimed at journalism students.1 The crux of the conversation focused
on how to effectively report the type of abuse that was coming to light in

MeToo. Another journalist on the panel had just co-reported a sprawling sexual

harassment investigation. You know the script as well as I do: bad man, complicit
company, lots of victims, an open secret, and lots of power and money.
As we all spoke to our experiences in the newsroom, over navigating sources,
over talking to assault or harassment victims, the aforementioned journalist
stressed the importance of records: her sources had filed reports with HR, her
sources had retained attorneys and had crafted long, extensive paper trails of
what they had endured. She stressed these metrics as if this was the barrier for
entry with assault. As if your sources need materials of this class to validate their
claims.
What’s deeply concerning about presenting this to a room full of green
journalists is that this standard applies a significant classist barrier to assault
claims. Because in order to make those extensive paper trails, you need money.
You need to work in a company or a capacity that has an HR department to
begin with. You need to have the funds to both seek out an attorney and put
them on retainer. This is not a feasible scenario for most people in most
workplaces with most wages. Latinas are overrepresented in low-wage jobs,
“typically” earning a maximum of about $24,000 a year.2 Almost half of the
professions that most commonly employ Native women—waiters, cooks,
cleaners, childcare workers—pay less than $10 an hour.3 And Micronesian,
Bangladeshi, and Hmong Americans have poverty rates 50 percent higher than
the national average.4 And yet, this expensive trajectory to potential justice is
being upheld as the standard.
Women need to be seen in this justice system. But we don’t see them; we see,
recognize, and respond to money. Just like the suffragettes and contemporary
white feminists have advocated.
There are even bigger financial costs to consider. In 2016, I interviewed
Gretchen Carlson’s attorney after the journalist and news commentator filed
sexual harassment charges against Roger Ailes, CEO and chairman of Fox
News.5 Carlson’s attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, explained to me how many HR
companies do not have the best interest of the employee in mind when
allegations are brought to their attention. She recommended going to an
attorney first, before HR, to determine if abuse is actionable—another barrier
sealed with money. She also told me something that has stayed with me
whenever I hear #MeToo skeptics speak to the importance of taking these
allegations to the ambiguous “courts.”
“When any woman who is the victim of sexual harassment comes to me, one
of the first things I say is that my clients often lose their jobs. Even if we win,
even if we get a settlement,” Smith said.6
But what kind of victim can pursue the legal avenues of abuse at the expense
of their job?
A financially secure one. Also known as the merging of white feminism and

MeToo.

Money has always been the undercurrent of abuse, propelling predators forward
along a sea of open secrets and even public allegations.
Three years before the #MeToo movement by activist Tarana Burke would be
reawakened, Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter in the New York Times.7 In the
2014 op-ed, she wrote a deceptively powerful examination of the economics that
continued to facilitate abuse. Framed around the allegations that her father,
writer and director Woody Allen, had sexually assaulted her as a child, she wrote
about his 2014 Oscar nomination and how his multi-decade story of sweeping
cultural acceptance was “a living testament to the way our society fails the
survivors of sexual assault and abuse.”8 (Allen has consistently denied these
allegations.)
And then, she posed these important questions:
What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin?
What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You
knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?9
In a cultural interrogation of what allows systemic abuse to flourish, Farrow’s
audit attempted to elevate national discussions of abuse by going beyond the
predator. She invoked a more holistic understanding of abuse and power by
asking us to consider the layers of support, credibility, and stardom that annually
infused Allen’s career. This crucial and deftly executed expansion of focus placed
scrutiny and responsibility on the sub-economies that had sustained alleged
predators. The fact that her list of female stars pulled from a spectrum of ages
and career tropes, from America’s sweethearts, to alluring sexpot, to the Oscar
revered, sent a strong statement for how far-reaching this economy was.
Alongside the multi-decade careers of these actors, the endurance of Allen’s
influence was sustained.
Three years later, some of the strongest reporting to come out of #MeToo
would be those investigations that performed similar tactics: revealing the layers
and layers of assistants, colleagues, managers, business partners, HR
departments, board members, and executives who helped sustain a workplace
culture where this type of predation was enabled. And that these patterns were
and are consistent across industries, private and federal institutions, and small
businesses through sprawling enterprises. The collective work of these
individuals to maintain this ecosystem of abuse, where everyone knew about
that manager who was leery or that particular coworker who had assaulted
several colleagues, was nearly always nourished through individualized threat:
you will lose your job if you speak out, you will lose assignments, you will lose
credibility, ultimately, you will lose. The threat is always personal.
This tactic was wildly successful in weighing on the individual to prevent a
collective understanding or recognition of abuse, specifically by playing to
personalized gains and losses. It was proficient in keeping the collective
disbanded by casting the losses and gains in highly personal realities. The effect
was powerful: personalized protection and collective denial.
There have been so many incredible efforts to overcome this tactic. When I
think about what made the original structure of consciousness-raising groups in
second-wave feminism so commanding, it was the collective understanding of
deeply personal experiences. So, in sharing what hypothetically happened to me
as a seven-year-old girl and then, learning about what happened to you as a ten-
year-old girl, we see parallels in our experiences but also beyond our experiences.
We see the systems that have enabled both these things to happen to us and the
aftermath they carried.

MeToo seemed to echo this same connecting of the dots—only it was

happening in real time. The metaphoric living room that we were all sitting in
was in the New York Times and Twitter and Instagram and group text messages
in which everyone, from female farmworkers to actors, were sharing what had
happened to them.
And this time, the systems in question were specific company cultures and
climates, namely culturally revered, successful ones. While it was easy and not
particularly nuanced to reduce some of these environments to shorthands we
were familiar with like “boys’ clubs,” and “frat houses,” some other abusive
environments could not be slotted neatly into these terms.
In this post–Lean In climate, the women-led or women-dominated spaces
had been positioned as pioneering, forward-thinking, and unabashedly
“feminist.” I remember after the initial tier of #MeToo reporting that detailed
abuse by high-profile, powerful men, I noticed some responses on Twitter
expressing gratitude for working in all-female environments—like gender would
somehow control for all abusive dynamics. We learned that it didn’t.

MeToo would reveal the extent to which feminist-identified icons

perpetuated the abusive systems within which they operated. Since 2017, a
number of prominent white women have been implicated in facilitating abuse
from their positions of power.
The first female Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, was
reported to have “shield[ed] a top advisor accused of harassment in 2008.”10 In a
typical dynamic explored well, a young woman on the campaign reported
repeated sexual harassment by a more senior associate, an advisor to Clinton. In
response, the young woman was reportedly moved to a different job and the
accused was docked several weeks’ pay and given a mandate to go to counseling.
In a story we now know very well, the young woman’s career was altered by the
alleged abuse that was inflicted upon her. Comparatively, the accused got to stay
on track. Multiple advisors told Clinton to fire this advisor, but she refused. (A
spokesperson for Clinton told the New York Times in a statement “To ensure a
safe working environment, the campaign had a process to address complaints of
misconduct or harassment. When matters arose, they were reviewed in
accordance with these policies, and appropriate action was taken. This
complaint was no exception.)11 For a feminist-aligned politician, this allegiance
to maintaining influence and structure as she knew it seemed stronger than a
young woman’s needs upon being harassed.
Similar stories emerged. In 2017, the New York Times reported that the
president and chief executive of New York Public Radio, Laura Walker, allegedly
“pushed growth at the cost of the station’s culture,” rife with abuse and
harassment.12 A formal investigation “absolved” Walker of any direct
responsibility,13 but the employees told the Times that the unrelenting thirst for
success meant “management developed a blind spot at the nexus of gender, race,
power and personnel. The station’s human resources practices had not kept pace
with its growth, employees said.”14 (This echoes traces of Miki Agrawal of
Thinx, who responded to abuse allegations with the assertion that her business
was successful.) Employees were allegedly belittled, bullied, and abused for the
sake of performance metrics, and by 2018, the company had a lot to show for it:
Under their leadership [Walker and her deputy and chief content officer,
Dean Cappello], the station has grown in reach and funding. In 1995,
shortly before the two started, WNYC, with its city-owned AM and FM
stations, had a weekly audience of 1 million and a budget of $8 million,
with $11.8 million in annual fund-raising. Today, New York Public
Radio, an independent nonprofit that owns WNYC, WQXR and other
entities, boasts a monthly audience of 26 million, including streaming and
downloads, and a $100 million budget, with $52 million in annual fund-
raising.15
In 2017, Walker gave an interview on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, where
she admitted to knowing some allegations but not all.16 Cappello told the New
York Times in a statement “as I get pulled in more directions, I have more
meetings that are on the go, often with coffee involved.” And: “The organization
has had a hand-built quality for a long time; that’s obviously not who we are
today and change is necessary. And welcome.”17
What we continue to know from #MeToo through formalized slavery in the
United States is that abuse is profitable. And if you just understand success solely
through currency, as capitalism often does, you avoid taking into account the
processes, protocols, and management styles that got you there. I see this as
going hand in hand with a larger narrative. When I’ve interviewed business
owners or performed any reporting on an industry, money is the metric that’s
cited to understand them and their endeavors. Money becomes the marker for
ingenuity, the shorthand for genius, the fastest way to communicate that they
possess solutions. But it isn’t—it’s just that, money. And nothing confirms that
more than seeing the number of successful enterprises that reportedly have
abusive work cultures. While the money has been touted as the mark of their
relevance, their competitiveness, their possession of something innovative, the
list of their victims confirms that there isn’t really anything innovative about
them. They have relied on the age-old tactics of slave masters, of patriarchs, and
of profiteers. They just replicated a pattern of violation as it leads to profit.
Walker seemed to allude to a similar critique. Two years before stepping
down,18 she said in a statement:
As a woman leader of a public media organization, I know what’s at stake.
We need to take a deep look inward at our organizational structure and
our culture, to ensure that we will live up to the values of respect, equity
and inclusion that we espouse in our work every day.19

MeToo punctured the shortsighted assumption that abuse was somehow not

present in a female-led professional sphere, but it revealed a lot more about the
“feminism” of these feminist-positioned figures. What aligns Hillary Clinton to
actresses like Cate Blanchett, Scarlett Johansson (who was a speaker at the 2017
Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and spoke passionately about obtaining
birth control from Planned Parenthood as a teenager,20) and Kate Winslet
signing on to do multiple Woody Allen films is the dedication to capital above all
else. I interpret their participation in upholding predatory systems as feminists
revealing, yet again, that white feminism is very singular in its execution. It’s
about getting ahead in the existing power structure, regardless of the harm it
causes to other people. As long as they are rich and winning, it’s “feminism.”
But what’s even more revealing about this ideology is that evasions are
nevertheless always constructed as defenses of this power, these institutions, or
systems—never interrogations.
In 2014, after Farrow published her piece in the New York Times, Blanchett
was asked about the allegations as she was en route to an afterparty in Santa
Barbara, California, following the release of the film Blue Jasmine. She said, “It’s
obviously been a long and painful situation for the family and I hope they find
some resolution and peace.”21 Four years later, after #MeToo and a slew of
actors had expressed regret over working with Allen, CNN’s Christiane
Amanpour posed the question that put white feminism on one side and support
for abuse survivors on the other. She posed to Blanchett: “How do you
juxtapose being a #MeToo proponent, a Time’s Up proponent, and staying
silent or having worked with Woody Allen?”22
Blanchett debated this interpretation of her career, stating first, “I don’t think
I’ve stayed silent at all.” She elaborated:
At the time that I worked with Woody Allen, I knew nothing of the
allegations, and it came out during the time that the film was released. At
the time, I said it’s a very painful and complicated situation for the family,
which I hope they have the ability to resolve. And if these allegations need
to be re-examined which, in my understanding, they’ve been through
court, then I’m a big believer in the justice system and setting legal
precedents. If the case needs to be reopened, I am absolutely,
wholeheartedly in support of that. Because I think that there’s one thing
about—social media is fantastic about raising awareness about issues, but
it’s not the judge and jury.23
There’s a lot of telltale signs of white feminism here; scripts that white women
have generally operated by to protect both themselves and the values they often
represent and guard. Blanchett is performing white womanhood here just as
history has always outlined. First and foremost, she evades virtually any
responsibility. White feminism is good at this game, shifting narratives and
shirking responsibility to excuse allegiances that compromise feminist branding
or positioning.
Next, she launches into a defense of institutions, keeping to many of the
proprietary conventions that suffragettes in the first wave practiced. Much like
them, she is signaling respectability, decorum, and the structures that facilitate
them. Her championing of the “justice system” funnels her respect and
feminism right back into the institutions that have actually failed abuse survivors
again and again. The whole swell of #MeToo was in response to these very
systems not sufficiently addressing the sprawling terrain of abuse and assault
people were experiencing. And yet, Blanchett uses that same system to gauge and
mark her support.
This is indicative of a broader divide. Anytime I hear a feminist-identified
white woman pledge allegiance to “the justice system” or “the courts,” I know
immediately that our gender politics fundamentally differ. This is a way of
legislating, of seeing, of assessing crime that has erected the following reality in
the United States: murders of white people are more likely to be solved than
murders of Black people;24 in some cities where Black women constitute less
than 10 percent of the population, they constitute almost half of all the female
arrests, according to data from 2015;25 within sex work, the arrest rate is nearly
five times higher for Black people than for white people;26 in New York City, the
much debated stop-and-frisk policy has yielded that only 10 percent of the stops
are performed on white people—even though they make up 45 percent of the
population. Over 80 percent of the stops are on Black and Latinx people, yet 80
percent concluded without arrest or summons.27 The only way you can be “a
big believer” in this justice system and be a feminist is if you are a white feminist.
You can flip it the other way too. In terms of who makes these decisions and
who gets to make up the juries that determine these fates, institutionalized
racism has been very clear about who gets to sit there. Consistent regional
studies have determined that Black jurors specifically are often “struck” from the
selection process way more than whites. A study of criminal cases from 1983 and
1993 in Philadelphia determined that prosecutors removed 52 percent of
potential Black jurors vs. only 23 percent of non-Black jurors.28 These numbers
have seemed roughly consistent in other regions too: between 1990 and 2010,
state prosecutors in North Carolina removed about 53 percent of Black people
eligible for juries in capital criminal cases vs. about 26 percent of non-Black
people (primarily white, but also Native American, Latinx, Asian, Pacific
Islander, and mixed race).29 Along a similar time period, a county in Louisiana
was successful in nixing 55 percent of Blacks vs. 16 percent of white potential
jurors.30
There are other counties and prosecutors’ individual careers that depict this
same pattern. And this formula, this protection of judicial power and who holds
it, runs a through line from 2019 to the all-white jury who felt empowered
enough to let the white men who lynched Emmett Till walk free. This is a space
where the number of partners a woman has had in her life, the state of her
virginity, the details of her dress, her level of intoxication, and the very nature of
her “flirtatious” behavior, as interpreted by others, have operated as a perfectly
sound legal argument.
So this allegiance to the courts to properly ferret out abusers mimics that cul-
de-sac of white feminist logic that so often arises in their political arguments. It
doesn’t actually go anywhere or disrupt prominent pillars of oppression. If
anything, it directs resources, representation, and political ideologies into
preserving them.
But Blanchett’s use of institution to sidestep a question about practices and
politics speaks to a larger pattern in white feminism: using business as usual to
evade a question about practices and politics.
This is often apparent in brands or franchises that have traded in on women’s
empowerment narratives with political origin stories. In 2019, Vox published an
explainer piece on the “controversial business of The Wing,” the social club and
co-working space that had received criticism for playing to corporate feminism.
While the brand’s Instagram and general social media presence has leaned
heavily on a feminist archive of protests, activists, International Women’s Day,
Equal Pay Day, Pride parades, and other political wins, the cofounders Audrey
Gelman and Lauren Kassan clarified that they did not see their company as
“feminist.” (The previous year, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
described The Wing as a “feminist company” on Twitter when responding to
news that the company would extend full-time benefits to part-time
employees.)31 Vox reporting details, “The company’s policies are feminist,
Gelman told Vox. But, she adds, ‘Are we the answer to every facet and historic
dilemma of feminism? No, and we don’t claim to be.’”32
Sidestep accomplished.

Chapter Twenty
Our Collective Future Is in the Way We View One Another

AFTER WOMEN ARE SEEN, obtain basic resources and decent pay for labor, and are
recognized as people in the criminal justice system, they need the means to grow
—they need access to education and small-business opportunities.
Business enterprises may turn to women and people of color for leadership in
times of corporate crisis, but in a national crisis, we don’t think of them.
In late March 2020, Violet Moya, a part-time worker at Sephora in Houston,
Texas, wrote an op-ed detailing how when the coronavirus hit, she was abruptly
laid off from the company.1 After two years of trying to work more and more for
Sephora, a brand she liked, accruing more hours, putting her personal life
behind company needs, and being present and willing to do anything her
managers needed, she said she was laid off with $278 of severance. And that sum
was not extended to cover her bills or compensate for lost wages; she wrote that
“it seemed the money was offered to buy our silence. If I signed [the severance
agreement], I couldn’t say anything about how Sephora treated me and other
part-time workers, and that didn’t sit right with me. So I didn’t.”2 That isn’t to
suggest she didn’t need the money. She managed to get SNAP benefits and, like
a lot of Americans, called the unemployment office every day starting at 7 a.m.
all through the day in the hopes of getting someone on the phone: “It feels like a
job I’m not getting paid for.” But in Texas, employers can facilitate
unemployment claims for their laid-off workers, an initiative that Moya says
Sephora has not taken advantage of. Sephora declined to comment for this book.
But nothing in the way she was deeply undervalued at the company, as a
Latina, as a part-time worker, prior to the pandemic, indicates that they would.
“I never really questioned the things that felt unfair in my job. I thought if I
worked hard and was flexible, eventually I’d get to full time and better wages.
Now I realize I was just drinking the corporate Kool-Aid.”3
She advocates for a different economy, one she has yet to see because “I know
we can’t go back to the way things were.” But so far, government relief efforts are
on track to take us there.
When the Senate passed the historic $2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill,4 known
as the CARES Act, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell specified, “This
isn’t even a stimulus package. It is emergency relief. Emergency relief. That’s
what this is.”5 Yet across that wide-sweeping emergency relief that spanned
corporations, education, individual taxpayers, small businesses, and more, there
were no investments specifically in women.
The Paycheck Protection Program, which provided $349 billion to keep
small businesses afloat, ran out of funding in less than two weeks,6 with nothing
put aside for women-run enterprises except the assurance that they will
“consider applications” from women- and minority-run businesses.7 And yet,
when we are talking about small businesses, we are indirectly talking about
women: 99.9 percent of women-owned businesses have fewer than five hundred
employees and employ 9.4 million people total as of 2016.8 Their collective
annual payroll comes to $318 billion, without even taking into account rent,
supplies, and outside contracts.9
Schools, food banks, and food stamps received additional funding. But even
when unemployment insurance was expanded, there were no specifications for
women who would have to abandon their jobs outside the home to care for
infected family or children who were now effectively homeschooled.10 Thanks
to the CARES Act, menstrual products can now be reimbursed under health
flexible spending accounts.11 That’s it. A second coronavirus relief bill prior to
CARES expanded funding for the Women, Infants and Children (WIC)12
nutrition program.13
But nothing for victims of domestic violence, homeless or otherwise trapped
with their abusers, which the United Nations explicitly urged governments to
address in their COVID-19 lockdowns.14 Nothing for undocumented
women.15 Nothing for incarcerated women, who were already “medically
compromised” prior to the pandemic, with little access to healthcare.16 Like
Andrea Circle Bear, the first female federal prisoner to die from the
coronavirus.17 And she was pregnant.
The thirty-year-old mother, who was jailed for a nonviolent drug offense,
gave birth on a ventilator shortly after starting her sentence. A preexisting
condition left her vulnerable to COVID-19, and she died a few weeks after her
baby was born. But federal efforts to protect Bear and women like her were not a
priority. Holly Harris, president and executive director of the Justice Action
Network, told the Washington Post that prosecutors, judges, sheriffs, and others
were working on a grassroots level to reduce incarceration where social
distancing is considered impossible.18 But many of these efforts were to
compensate for the broader actions that were not being taken: “Congress fell
short in the phase three [coronavirus relief] package and didn’t do enough to
address this burgeoning crisis in our prisons that’s gonna spread all over our
country… and so now is the time to take action at the federal level.”19
As of this writing, that has yet to happen. And it’s unclear to me whether
female representatives in Congress and the House, who ascended to these roles
on a raft of white feminism, will build a healthy, stable reality for women like
Andrea Circle Bear or Violet Moya. When challenged on the scope of the relief
bills by CNN’s Jake Tapper, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “just calm down” before
assuring us relief would come in the next bill.20
The $484 billion fourth coronavirus relief bill for small businesses, hospitals,
and increased testing was only voted down by one Democrat, Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for its insufficiency.21 After the vote, she told the
press, “I cannot go back to my communities and tell them to just wait for
CARES four because we have now passed three, four pieces of legislation that’s
related to coronavirus. And every time it’s the next one, the next one, the next
one, and my constituents are dying.”22 She reaffirmed her opposition on the
House floor, adding, “The only folks they have urgency around are folks like
Ruth’s Chris Steak House and Shake Shack. Those are the people getting
assistance in this bill. You are not trying to fix this bill for mom and pops…. It is
unconscionable. If you had urgency, you would legislate like rent was due on
May 1 and make sure we include rent and mortgage relief for our
constituents.”23
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal also echoed that this bill was not a relief to
many, but rather a better version of bad. “We took a bad, insufficient Republican
package that was proposed, and we made it better, so that’s good,” she
clarified.24 But these initiatives were not going to address the number of lost
American lives that quickly careened past Vietnam War numbers.
Even so, you know what a better version of bad sounds like? White feminism.
In the United States, “revolution” is often a narrative we apply to things you can
buy. Advances in technology, underwear that makes us feel a certain way, period
products, makeup that is made with specific ingredients, television shows that
embody a certain perspective, automation that changes physical labor or the way
we learn, medicine and therapies that only certain people can afford, books you
hold in your hands. Our ability to innovate in these spaces, to think differently
and build out these visions, is monumental and extraordinary.
But these products will not supplant the need for policy changes; they will
inevitably present new avenues that will need to be regulated by policy changes.
Otherwise, these products, by our own hands and minds, simply mirror back the
supremacy that already exists. That’s where the club gets privatized. Where the
circle gets elite. Where what was once an issue, is now a sponsored conference
you pay several hundred dollars for.
We also need to realize that some of these products are engineered to create
more distance between us, to engender and placate a hierarchy in the way we
view one another, whether it’s a master’s degree from a lofty institution, or a
particular piece of technology, or a face serum. They have the capacity to
perpetuate a mythology about how you relate to other people. But once
products are just products—decorative, useful, a means to an end, they lose this
power to colonize us.
The same can be said of the many companies, organizations, universities, and
government bodies that rely on us to maintain their relevance, their glossy sheen,
as well as their valuable reputation. Without us voting, patronizing, buying,
working, and sustaining their life force, they cease to be. And even as these
bodies grow and become more sprawling, this truth endures. It doesn’t really
matter how large a company or a studio or a government body gets; if one day
employees walk out to protest an all-white leadership team, business will come
to a halt.
The reason this doesn’t happen as often as it could has everything to do with
how these institutions trade on our vulnerability—the way they strategically try
to keep us distant from one another with threats, personal accolades, and stories
as to why we are there in the first place: we are the special one, we aren’t like
those other people who we resemble, we work so hard, they would hate to see us
lose an opportunity at X, we belong at this elite fill-in-the-blank.
This individualistic understanding of these dynamics is also replicated even in
the narratives to dismantle them. When I’ve spoken publicly about gender
oppression or racism or heterosexism or xenophobia or sexual assault, I always
get questions from well-intentioned women about what they can do. They want
to know how they can personally combat these forces in their nonprofits, their
businesses, their classrooms, and their homes.
But there is very little that you, the single person holding this book or
approaching me after a speaking engagement, can do. The revolution will not be
you alone, despite what white feminism has told you. There is only the resistance
movements that you will build with other people. Across the women you work
with, the other people in your neighborhood, and the communities you build
digitally and nationally.
It’s historically clear what questions power, what redefines landscapes so they
reflect more of our needs rather than what is the most convenient and profitable.
It’s when I consider this trajectory that I see our challenges aren’t really with
power; they are with each other.
I see this with women I’ve worked with or have interviewed who inevitably
interpret increased racial, queer, and class literacy as being weaponized against
them. A white woman I worked with once told me at a work function that a
picture of her in a kimono could ruin her career—a through line I see all the way
to men interpreting #MeToo as an attack on their success. The threat is
understood along the lines of their business being compromised, their careers
being tarnished, their profits being hit. This too is an individual assessment of
how these systems are supposed to operate and how, even in feminist strategies,
you are still expecting these narratives to serve you first and foremost.
In tandem, I think another reality we should be prepared for is that the
gender revolution isn’t profitable. Feminism will not ultimately yield that every
single woman is rich and goes to Vassar and runs a company while also having
2.5 kids with a married partner. Feminism, for a lot of people, will take the shape
of policies, like the first-ever federal Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.25 If passed,
the bill of rights will secure paid sick days, healthcare, and retirement savings for
workers who report to private homes or companies in roles like nannies,
cleaners, and caregivers for seniors and people with disabilities. The legislation
proposes break times, scheduling protocols, grants for training programs, and a
new task force to ensure that these rights and avenues to report harassment and
assault are protected.26 It’s the first federal initiative that aims to provide
protections like these to the entire care-work sector—an effort that has eluded
labor organizers since the New Deal.
What will be sweeping and revolutionary is when we finally cement in the
United States the right to paid family leave, when we culturally acknowledge
that caring for each other, in all its facets and dimensions and combinations, is
labor. Or when we legislate criminal justice reform that effectively tackles “the
girlfriend problem,” a shorthand for the reason a disproportionate number of
women and girls are incarcerated each year—executing crimes under the
mandate, pressure, and at times abuse of a male partner. Or when after decades
of failed bills in the House and Senate to pass LGBTQ employee protection,27
the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that queer and trans people can maintain job
security,28 hopefully putting a dent in the raging queer American hunger crisis
in which more than one in four queer people couldn’t afford food.29 Or when
our narratives on being a country of “family values” is reflected in
comprehensive gun control initiatives, to combat the one million women who
have been shot or shot at by intimate partners and the 4.5 million women who
have been threatened with a gun.30

Chapter Twenty-One
What We Can Change Now

THE PLACE TO ADVANCE the needs of the public, rather than the elite, is to actively
participate in and understand the public sphere, to dismantle the notion,
however subtle, that public resources are somehow dirty, bad, or even vaguely
not good. The way to connecting with each other and keeping these bonds
strong is by maintaining respect, funding, and attendance for spaces and
amenities that are public. Libraries, parks, walk-in clinics, public transportation,
state and community education—things that you don’t need to pay a bunch of
money or swipe a fancy card to access or use but were designed with all of us in
mind. Embracing and holding in high regard these places and services that our
taxes pay for keeps us arm-in-arm. It keeps us in close quarters so when some
politician like Todd Akin makes irreverent and misogynistic declarations like, “If
it is a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing
down,”1 we assemble into a multi-racial, multi-class, multi-gendered response.
Lately, we haven’t been entirely prepared to enact movements across identity
on a large enough scale to topple power. A 2013 survey found that three-
quarters of white Americans said their social groups were composed entirely of
other white people.2 In fact, one of the things that both registered Democrats
and Republicans have in common is that they are both likely to have all-white
friend groups.3 We are starting and continuing these divisions quite young.
More than half of American children went to racially or economically segregated
public schools in 2016,4 but most Black Americans (seven in ten) are far more
supportive of integrated classrooms while white Americans are considerably less
enthusiastic on this idea. So much so that even in neighborhoods that aren’t that
racially diverse (90 percent of the residents are one race), white participants say
that their communities are as diverse as they’d like them to be.5
Our country, our respective fields, our culture has been very effective in
taking us away from one another, even as certain rights have been achieved.
These strategies to incessantly privatize, to hold on to how things have always
been, to close off communities, should be interpreted as grasps for power;
retaliatory efforts to hold on to superiority as it is being compromised.
The way back from this siloing is to utilize opportunities to learn more about
each other rather than continuing the oratory traditions as to why some people
are better, have more, are brutalized, have “made it.” Undoing this kind of
aspirational and denigratory lore about how resources and opportunities and
safety and health have been constructed is essential to developing proximity with
one another in times of crisis. This also has the capacity to happen in more
private quarters, in spaces just for marginalized people who haven’t had the
avenues to find each other because of the same structures that keep them apart.
Of course, not everyone will want to do this or close these very deep divides.
But listening attentively to those who have tried often contains the way forward.
In the fall of 2015, actress Viola Davis accepted a historic win as the first
Black actress to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.
When she accepted her award for her performance in How to Get Away with
Murder, the first thing she said was this:
In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely
flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me
over that line, but I can’t seem to get there no-how. I can’t seem to get over
that line.6
She attributed the quote to Harriet Tubman, adding further in her own words
that Black actresses cannot achieve this type of industry recognition without
getting roles in the first place—an eloquent indictment of her business’s hiring
practices.
Well beyond apt criticisms of structural inequality, Davis’s echoing of
Tubman’s quote has always stayed with me. Not just for using the very public
opportunity to acknowledge fundamental differences between white and Black
women, but for implicating that there is a place that we are trying to get to
together. That white women and other disenfranchised genders are making
efforts to get to one another. And yet, that common place continues to evade us
—despite the “beautiful white women with their arms stretched out” and the
promise of the “green fields and lovely flowers.”
It’s a haunting image, particularly because I’ve often interpreted Tubman’s
description of the white women as beckoning to her—of saying that they’ve
made space for her, that they want her with them. I’ve felt that too. That the
white women or white-aspiring women I’ve worked with or been on panels with
or who I’ve interviewed or who have interviewed me ultimately want me to join
them. They want me to feel like I belong with them.
But it’s been significant to me that Tubman’s description of this dynamic
begins and ends with the “line.” I know this line so well, this fundamental halt in
conversation or space where you get quiet or I get quiet and we don’t really see
each other anymore. We just see that we’re different. That’s the line. That we’ve
experienced gender in such completely, almost opposing, ways and we often seek
to invalidate each other’s experiences by asserting our own.
I used to spend a lot of my professional life trying to get to the other side of
the line—often by trying to code and recode these realities in ways that white
straight women would respond to. I’ve tried to get there with data and
buzzwords and trends and political news stories that actually allude to much
larger landscapes of oppression. I’ve tried to get there with profiles of women I
admire or who deviate from the value system we’re all supposed to adhere to.
I’ve made attempts to get there with specific coverage of certain celebrities, by
interviewing authors, by engineering a point of view through a point of view
that they will recognize.
But I feel a certain intimate understanding for Tubman’s description of
ultimately not getting there. There’s an echoing to her disappointment of
“can’t… get there no-how” that I know in my own way, in my own century, from
my own vantage point—when white feminists deny that this history is valid,
refuse that they have perpetuated these patterns in this particular way, oppose
examples, explanations, or even questions.
I’ve often taken this disappointment inward, running through alternative
language I could have used or different approaches I could have taken. I weigh
white feminist reactions and consider if they would have responded in a more
amenable way if I had led with this anecdote first, this story, this piece of data.
I’ve reconsidered tone, facial expressions, body language. I’ve balanced the exact
weight of a sentence so that the accusation softens into the vowels rather than
hardens. But the ideological divide is still often something I can’t cross.
And somewhere along my career specifically, I’ve reread Tubman’s imagery
and deciphered that I’m actually not supposed to. The reason that I can’t get
over the line is that it’s not for me; it’s for you. You need to come to me.
Where white feminism begins is precisely where white feminism will end:
with the people who uphold it. It’s by their hands that this ideology will either
endure, evolving with another wave of feminism and gender rights, or dying out
among other practices. White feminists will be the ones who decide how long we
will keep playing to these historical scripts and when we will stop mythologizing
that we are all aligned in the same way under the same power.
We won’t wait for them. Many of us have long ago built our own feminisms,
our own movements, our own strategies for pulling apart what subjugates us,
and we will continue those legacies with or without their efforts.
But to them, I say that we have green fields and lovely flowers and our arms
stretched out.
Acknowledgments
I’VE WANTED TO PUBLISH a book since I was a very little girl, and many, many
people from all corners of my life ensured that I one day would. The steadfast
and ardent support of my childhood dream by so many has been just as
rewarding as publishing White Feminism itself.
I’m deeply thankful to my literary agent, Carrie Howland, who has known
me for ten years and has always prioritized the longevity, integrity, and direction
of my career over all other opportunities, no matter how alluring. She has always
seen my potential as a writer, long before I was on the top of any elite masthead.
I’m infinitely grateful to my editor, Michelle Herrera Mulligan, who
demonstrated a herculean dedication to this thesis, the development of this
narrative, and unwavering support to White Feminism’s urgency in the world.
Some editors are great, but none of them are Michelle. I’m profoundly thankful
to Melanie Iglesias Pérez, who worked tirelessly on the backend to secure so
many critical logistics for this book—the fact that you are reading this is a direct
result of her labor. My thanks to the entire team at Atria for their facilitation of
this work along what could have been a very complicated conveyer belt, and
wasn’t: my gratitude to Sonja Singleton for making production so seamless and
organized on my end, and for answering my myriad style guide questions; my
awe and accolades to Min Choi for designing a perfect, instantly iconic cover
that was precisely what I always dreamed of, and to A. Kathryn Barrett for a
beautiful interior design that I will proudly show off for years to come. I’m very
thankful to Shida Carr for her candid publicity advice, Milena Brown for her
dedicated support in marketing, and Carolyn Levin for her thorough legal
review. I also want to thank my ninth-grade English teacher, Susan Spica, for
cultivating my love of reading and writing well outside of LAUSD parameters.
Many people helped get White Feminism off the ground long before she
embarked on her publishing trajectory. I’m tremendously thankful to the
Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School for their support and
recognition of this work, specifically Nicco Mele, Setti Warren, Liz Schwartz,
Heidi Legg, Susan Ocitti Mahoney, and Kelsi Power-Spirlet.
I’m greatly appreciative to my research assistant Priyanka Kaura for jumping
into this project with me with such palpable interest and my biggest thanks to
my always diligent and faithful fact checker, Laura Bullard, as well as the
ongoing support of her wife, Kayla. My gratitude also to Kerri Kolen, who
helped me tremendously with crafting the proposal for White Feminism.
I am immensely thankful to Barbara Smith for her mentorship,
encouragement of this work, suggestions that I look into the history of anti-
racist white women, and for the important legacy she created with Kitchen
Table: Woman of Color Press, without which, I doubt a book like this from a
publisher like Simon & Schuster would be possible. I’m very appreciative of
Kirsten Saxton, my Mills College advisor, whom I first met when I was eighteen
and who kept tabs on me long after I graduated. She was one of the first people
in my life who taught me to formally analyze gender, a lens I’ve taken with me
and actively nourished in every professional role I’ve had since. To that end, I’m
very grateful to my alma mater, Mills College, for teaching me how to think
critically across a lot of dimensions and being exactly the type of learning
environment I needed, academically and socio-politically, during such a critical
and formative time in my life.
Thank you to the many historians, thinkers, activists, and writers whose own
scholarship and work lace this book together. Thank you for writing down what
happened and for confirming, with your accounts of past and present, what I
always suspected to be true. Thank you also to the many young people who
attended my speaking engagements and who raised their hands to ask me
directly about white feminism. Keep asking. It was your questions that
prompted me to see the necessity of writing this book and I often thought of
you and your needs as I was writing it.
Thank you also to Kimia Sharifi for her guidance, support, and counsel,
specifically when avenues of my life were not so great.
Long before my career, I had many people in my life who when I said I
wanted to be a published author believed me, and treated that ambition as an
impending fact. I am no one in this life without the love of my closest friends:
Jeremy Allen, Ayana Bartholomew, Kelli Bartlett, Clay Chiles, Ian James Daniel,
Lily Ann Page, Camille Perri, Stacey Persoff, Sarah Powers, and Kelly Stewart.
Thank you for your confidence that this would always happen.
Similarly, my family has always mirrored back to me that this was my destiny.
Thank you to my father, John, who always supported my writing ventures in
every feasible way that a parent possibly can, and conveyed to me early that they
were worth pursuing in the first place. There was a time where you were my first
reader of everything and your early encouragement of my identity as a writer has
proved foundational to my confidence in being one. I’m very thankful to my in-
laws, Rolfe, Bonnie, Lynn, and Rick, for their encouragement of my career, as
well as Inga, Mark, Rowan, and Elliott. Thank you to my phenomenal late
grandparents, Jack and Kathleen, who would have been so proud to see this
book and always articulated their deep, deep pride in having me as their
granddaughter. Thank you to my late Grandma Naomi, who although I didn’t
have much physical time with on this planet, I know several decades later,
without a doubt, loved me very much.
Lastly, I’m besotted with my wife, Astrid, who continues to challenge me
intellectually and deems me capable of all things. Thank you for your insistence
that I write White Feminism and for assuming so much labor in both of our
lives so that I indeed could.
I love you, Astrid.
About the Author
KOA BECK IS THE former editor-in-chief of Jezebel. Previously, she was the
executive editor of Vogue, the senior features editor at MarieClaire.com, and co-
host of “The #MeToo Memos” on WNYC’s The Takeaway. Her literary
criticism and reporting have appeared in TheAtlantic.com, Out magazine, The
New York Observer, TheGuardian.com, Esquire.com, Vogue.com, and
MarieClaire.com, among others.
She was a guest editor for the 2019 special Pride section of the New York
Times commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, editing such
prominent voices as Kate Bornstein, Gavin Grimm, Julia Serano, and Barbara
Smith.
For her reporting on gender, LGBTQ rights, culture, and race, she has
spoken at Harvard Law School, Columbia Journalism School, the New York
Times, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other institutions. She
has also been interviewed by the BBC for her insight into American feminism.
Koa was awarded the Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy
School to write this book. She lives in Los Angeles with her wife.

Notes
Introduction

1. Janet Mock, “Nicki Minaj Is Here to Slay,” Marie Claire, October 11, 2016,
   https://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/a23019/nicki-minaj-november-2016-cover/.
2. Katie Robertson and Ben Smith, “Hearst Employees Say Magazine Boss Led Toxic Culture,” New
   York Times, July 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/business/media/hearst-
   harassment-troy-young.html.
3. Calin Van Paris, “This Manicurist Is Doing the Most Mesmerizing Nail Art in Self-Quarantine,”
   Vogue, March 26, 2020, https://www.vogue.com/article/mei-kawajiri-nail-art-mesmerizing-
   quarantine-manicures.
4. Kristen Radtke, “Why We Turn to Gardening in Times of Crisis,” Vogue, March 26, 2020,
   https://www.vogue.com/article/why-we-turn-to-gardening-in-times-of-crisis.
5. Andrea Bartz, “Uncomfortable Truth: Women Are Allowed to Be Mean Bosses, Too,” Marie Claire,
   March 24, 2020, https://www.marieclaire.com/career-advice/a31899385/female-ceo-male-ceo-
   comparison/.
   6.
   “Feminism,”
   New
   World
   Encyclopedia,
   April
   5,
   2017,
   https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/feminism.
6. S. K. Grogan, “Charles Fourier and the Nature of Women,” in French Socialism and Sexual Difference:
   Women and the New Society, 1803–44 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 20–41.
7. NCC Staff, “On This Day, the Seneca Falls Convention Begins,” Constitution Daily (blog), National
   Constitution Center, July 19, 2019, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-the-seneca-falls-
   convention-begins.
8. Carmin Chappell, “‘There’s Not Just One Women’s Lane’: A Record Number of Female Candidates
   Running for President,” CNBC, February 12, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/record-
   number-of-women-running-for -president-in-2020.html.
9. Jessica Bennett, “‘I Feel Like I Have Five Jobs’: Moms Navigate the Pandemic,” New York Times,
   March
   20,
   2020,
   https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/parenting/childcare-coronavirus-
   moms.html.
10. Drew Desilver, “A Record Number of Women Will Be Serving in the New Congress,” Pew Research
    Center, December 18, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/18/record-number-
    women-in-congress/.
11. Caroline Kitchener, “Why 2024 Is the Year We’ll Elect a Woman President,” The Lily, March 6, 2020,
    https://www.thelily.com/why-2024-is-the-year-well-elect-a-woman-president/.
12. Eileen Patten, “Racial, Gender Wage Gaps Persist in U.S. Despite Some Progress,” Pew Research
    Center, July 1, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/01/racial-gender-wage-gaps-
    persist-in-u-s-despite-some-progress/.
13. Ibid.
14. Camilo Maldonado, “Price of College Increasing Almost 8 Times Faster than Wages,” Forbes, July 24,
    2018,
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/price-of-college-increasing-
    almost-8-times-faster-than-wages/#2bdd5ba266c1.
    16.
    “Incarcerated
    Women
    and
    Girls,”
    Sentencing
    Project,
    June
    6,
    2019,
    https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/incarcerated-women-and-girls/.
15. Lauren E. Glaze and Laura M. Maruschak, Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children, US
    Department
    of
    Justice,
    Office
    of
    Justice
    Programs,
    March
    30,
    2010,
    https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pptmc.pdf.
16. Despite Significant Gains, Women of Color Have Lower Rates of Health Insurance than White Women,
    National Partnership for Women & Families, April 2019, https://www.nationalpartnership.org/our-
    work/resources/health-care/women-of-color-have-lower-rates-of-health-insurance-than-white-
    women.pdf.
17. Harmeet Kaur, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Been Catastrophic for House Cleaners and
    Nannies,” CNN, April 3, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/03/us/social-distancing-pandemic-
    domestic-workers-trnd/index.html.
18. Marisa Peñaloza, “Some Undocumented Domestic Workers Slip through Holes in Coronavirus Safety
    Net,”
    NPR,
    April
    3,
    2020,
    https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
    updates/2020/04/03/826280607/some-undocumented-domestic-workers-slip-through-holes-in-
    coronavirus-safety-net.
    Part I: The History of White Feminism
19. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 177.
    Chapter One
20. Ramin Setoodeh, “Taylor Swift Dishes on Her New Album Red, Dating, Heartbreak, and Grey’s
    Anatomy,” Daily Beast, July 14, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/taylor-swift-dishes-on-her-
    new-album-red-dating-heartbreak-and-greys-anatomy.
21. Mish Way, “Katy Perry, Billboard’s Woman of the Year, Wants You to Know She’s Not a Feminist, and
    Why That Matters,” Vice, December 5, 2012, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/rj58d6/katy-perry-
    billboards-woman-of-the-year-wants-you-to-know-shes-not-a-feminist-and-why-that-matters.
22. Belinda Luscombe, “Kelly Clarkson: ‘Not a Feminist,’ ” Time, October 30, 2013,
    https://entertainment.time.com/2013/10/30/kelly-clarkson-not-a-feminist/.
23. Daily Mail Reporter, “Revealed: Marissa Mayer Imposed Yahoo! Work-from-Home Ban after Spying
    on Employee Log-ins,” Daily Mail, March 4, 2013, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
    2287148/I-wouldnt-consider-feminist-says-Marissa-Mayer-revealed-imposed-Yahoo-work-home-ban-
    spying-employee-log-ins.html.
24. Sharday Mosurinjohn, “Maxim’s ‘Cure a Feminist’ Spreads the Sexism Even Farther than It Dared to
    Hope,” Bitch Media, March 26, 2012, https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/maxims-cure-a-feminist-
    sexism-magazine-feminism-sexuality.
25. Chelsea Rudman, “‘Feminazi’: The History of Limbaugh’s Trademark Slur against Women,” Media
    Matters, March 12, 2012, https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/feminazi-history-limbaughs-
    trademark-slur-against-women.
26. Jessica Bennett, “How to Reclaim the F-Word? Just Call Beyoncé,” Time, August 26, 2014,
    https://time.com/3181644/beyonce-reclaim-feminism-pop-star/.
27. Ibid.
28. Amanda Duberman, “Beyoncé’s Feminist VMAs Performance Got People Talking about Gender
    Equality,” HuffPost, August 25, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/beyonce-feminist-
    vmas_n_5708475.
29. Rebecca Carol, Kristina Myers, and Dr. Janet Lindman, “Who Was Alice Paul,” Alice Paul Institute,
    2015, https://www.alicepaul.org/who-was-alice-paul/.
    11.
    History.com
    Editors,
    “Quakers,”
    History.com,
    September
    6,
    2019,
    https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/history-of-quakerism#section_2.
30. Carol, Myers, and Lindman, “Who Was Alice Paul.”
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. “Burlington County Trust Company in Moorestown, New Jersey (NJ),” Bankencyclopedia.com,
    http://www.bankencyclopedia.com/Burlington-County-Trust-Company-12477-Moorestown-New-
    Jersey.html.
35. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “National American Woman Suffrage Association,”
    Britannica.com,
    https://www.britannica.com/topic/National-American-Woman-Suffrage-
    Association.
36. Ibid.
37. Carol, Myers, and Lindman, “Who Was Alice Paul.”
38. Ibid.
    21.
    “Alice
    Paul,”
    Americans
    Who
    Tell
    the
    Truth,
    https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/alice-paul.
    22.
    “Alice
    Paul
    Describes
    Force
    Feeding,”
    Library
    of
    Congress,
    https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbcmil.scrp6014301/.
39. “Alice Paul Talks,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbcmil.scrp6014202/.
40. “Miss Paul Tells of Tube-Feeding in an English Prison,” Alice Paul Institute,
    https://www.alicepaul.org/wp-
    content/uploads/2019/09/14_Forced_Feeding_Newspaper_Clips.pdf.
41. Carol, Myers, and Lindman, “Who Was Alice Paul.”
42. Ibid.
43. Emily Silva, “Unit 2 Source Detective Story,” Ram Pages, November 4, 2014,
    https://rampages.us/silvaea/unit-2-source-detective-story/.
    Chapter Two
44. Dayna Evans, “Do Women Still Need a Space of Their Own?” Cut, October 2016,
    https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/the-wing-womens-only-social-club-c-v-r.html.
45. “A New Era Is Coming Soon,” The Wing, https://www.the-wing.com/.
46. Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Women (New York: Columbia
    University Press, 1999), 87.
47. Jennifer Abel, “Mary Pickford: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,” Heavy, April 8, 2017,
    https://heavy.com/news/2017/04/mary-pickford-google-doodle-americas-sweetheart-girl-with-the-
    curls/.
48. “Mary Pickford as a Symbol of the ‘New Woman,’ ” News, University of Redlands, July 6, 2017,
    https://www.redlands.edu/news-events-social/news/news-landing-page/2017-news/july-2017/mary-
    pickford-as-symbol-of-the-new-woman/.
49. History.com Editors, “United Artists Created,” This Day in History, History.com, February 3, 2020,
    https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/united-artists-created.
    7.
    “Ethel
    Barrymore,”
    Turner
    Classic
    Movies,
    http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/10733%7C49240/Ethel-Barrymore/.
50. Ian Sansom, “Great Dynasties of the World: The Barrymores,” Guardian, October 1, 2010,
    https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/02/drew-barrymore-hollywood-drugs-alcohol.
51. Ibid.
52. S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge, UK:
    Cambridge University Press, 2008), 155.
53. Finnegan, Selling Suffrage.
54. Ibid., 100.
55. Finnegan, Selling Suffrage.
56. Ibid., 69.
57. Ibid.
58. Claire Heuchan, “The Internet’s Shameful Lesbophobia Problem,” AfterEllen, June 26, 2019,
    https://www.afterellen.com/general-news/553883-the-internets-shameful-lesbophobia-problem.
59. Miranda Yardley, “ ‘Girl’ Dick, the Cotton Ceiling and the Cultural War on Lesbians, Girls and
    Women,” AfterEllen, December 5, 2018, https://www.afterellen.com/general-news/567823-girl-dick-
    the-cotton-ceiling-and-the-cultural-war-on-lesbians-girls-and-women.
60. Dawn Ennis, “Michfest Womyn and Trans Women Ask ‘Why?’” Advocate, April 23, 2015,
    https://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/music/2015/04/23/michfest-womyn-and-trans-
    women-ask-why.
61. Lisa Vogel, statement, Women’s Liberation Radio News, Facebook, August 12, 2019,
    https://www.facebook.com/WLRNews4Women/posts/a-statement-from-lisa-vogel-founder-of-the-
    michigan-womyns-music-festival-that-w/2337303376508363/.
62. Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights
    Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 41.
63. Ibid., 40.
64. Ibid., 67.
65. Ibid., 83.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 109.
68. Ibid., 83.
69. K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman’s Movement for Legal Reform,
    1898–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 119.
70. Marino, Feminism for the Americas, 85.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 91.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., 112.
76. Ibid., 113.
77. Ibid., 85.
78. Ibid., 79.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., 78.
81. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 102.
82. Ibid., 105.
    Chapter Three
83. “Marching for the Vote: Remembering the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913,” American Women:
    Topical Essays, Library of Congress, https://guides.loc.gov/american-women-essays/marching-for-the-
    vote.
84. “1913 Woman Suffrage Procession,” National Park Service, September 1, 2020,
    https://www.nps.gov/articles/woman-suffrage-procession1913.htm.
85. Michelle Bernard, “Despite the Tremendous Risk, African American Women Marched for Suffrage,
    Too,”
    She
    the
    People
    (blog),
    Washington
    Post,
    March
    3,
    2013,
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/03/03/despite-the-tremendous-
    risk-african-american-women-marched-for-suffrage-too/.
86. “Icon: Inez Milholland (Boissevain) (1886–1916),” Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records
    of the National Woman’s Party, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/women-of-
    protest/articles-and-essays/selected-leaders-of-the-national-womans-party/icon/.
87. Bernard, “Despite the Tremendous Risk.”
88. Ama Ansah, “Votes for Women Means Votes for Black Women,” National Women’s History
    Museum, August 16, 2018, https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/votes-women-means-votes-
    black-women.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. IV
    (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902), 216.
96. Debra Michals, PhD, “Mary Church Terrell,” National Women’s History Museum, 2017,
    https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-church-terrell.
97. Bernard, “Despite the Tremendous Risk.”
98. Ansah, “Votes for Women Means Votes for Black Women.”
99. “Ida B. Wells in Suffrage March in 1913 Washington, DC,” Newspapers.com,
    https://www.newspapers.com/clip/20886298/ida-b-wells-in-suffrage-march-in-1913/.
100. “Marching for the Vote,” Library of Congress.
101. Ansah, “Votes for Women Means Votes for Black Women.”
102. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The Crisis,” Britannica.com, August 18, 2020,
     https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Crisis-American-magazine.
103. “1913 Woman Suffrage Procession,” National Park Service.
104. Ibid.
105. Ansah, “Votes for Women Means Votes for Black Women.”
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.
108. Jen Rice, “How Texas Prevented Black Women from Voting Decades After the 19th Amendment,”
     Houston Public Media, June 28, 2019, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/in-
     depth/2019/06/28/338050/100-years-ago-with-womens-suffrage-black-women-in-texas-didnt-get-
     the-right-to-vote/.
109. Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United
     States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 112.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid.
113. Daniel Geary, “The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition,” Atlantic, September 14, 2015,
     https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-
     edition/404632/.
114. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in
     America’s Second Wave (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 85.
115. “Highlights,” National Organization for Women, https://now.org/about/history/highlights/.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid.
118. Ibid.
119. Brian Balogh, Integrating the Sixties: The Origins, Structures, and Legitimacy of Public Policy in a
     Turbulent Decade (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 151.
120. Ibid.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid., 155.
123. Ibid., 152.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid., 155.
126. Ibid., 154.
127. “Highlights,” National Organization for Women.
128. “Ending Violence against Native Women,” Indian Law Resource Center,
     https://indianlaw.org/issue/ending-violence-against-native-women.
129. André B. Rosay, PhD, Violence against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men,
     National Institute of Justice Research Report, US Department of Justice, May 2016,
     https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249736.pdf.
130. Lyndsey Gilpin, “Native American Women Still Have the Highest Rates of Rape and Assault,” High
     Country News, June 7, 2016, https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-why-native-american-women-
     still-have-the-highest-rates-of-rape-and-assault.
131. “VAWA 2013’s Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdiction Five-Year Report,” National
     Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, March 20, 2018, http://www.niwrc.org/resources/vawa-
     2013%E2%80%99s-special-domestic-violence-criminal-jurisdiction-five-year-report.
132. Rebecca Nagle, “What the Violence Against Women Act Could Do in Indian Country—and One
     Major Flaw,” High Country News, December 11, 2018, https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-
     what-the-violence-against-women-act-could-do-in-indian-country-and-one-major-flaw.
133. “VAWA 2013’s Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdiction Five-Year Report.”
134. Glenna Stumblingbear-Riddle, PhD, “Standing with Our Sisters: MMIWG2S,” American
     Psychological
     Association,
     November
     2018,
     https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/communique/2018/11/standing-sisters.
135. Carey Dunne, “‘No More Stolen Sisters’: 12,000-Mile Ride to Highlight Missing Indigenous
     Women,” Guardian, June 7, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/07/indigenous-
     women-missing-murdered-activists-ride-north-america.
136. Annita Lucchesi, PhD-c, and Abigail Echo-Hawk, MA, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women &
     Girls,
     Urban
     Indian
     Health
     Institute,
     2018,
     http://www.uihi.org/wp-
     content/uploads/2018/11/Missing-and-Murdered-Indigenous-Women-and-Girls-Report.pdf?tp=1.
137. Annita Lucchesi, “About,” AnnitaLucchesi.com, 2020, https://www.annitalucchesi.com/about-1.
138. Lucchesi and Echo-Hawk, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls.
139. Dunne, “ ‘No More Stolen Sisters.’”
140. Danyelle Khmara, “Arizona Joins the Ranks Looking to End Violence against Indigenous Women,”
     Arizona Daily Star, May 26, 2019, https://tucson.com/news/local/arizona-joins-the-ranks-looking-to-
     end-violence-against-indigenous/article_9437fc65-70c7-5ad7-a85c-12585899b534.html.
141. Reclaiming Power and Place, vol. 1a, National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous
     Women
     and
     Girls,
     2019,
     https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-
     content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Report_Vol_1a.pdf.
142. Ibid.
143. Margaret Moss, “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls: An Epidemic on Both Sides of
     the Medicine Line,” Intercontinental Cry, June 6, 2019, https://intercontinentalcry.org/missing-and-
     murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls-an-epidemic-on-both-sides-of-the-medicine-line/.
     62.
     Jen
     Deerinwater,
     “Testimonials,”
     JenDeerinwater.com,
     https://web.archive.org/web/20200615171744/http://www.jendeerinwater.com/.
144. Kiki Intarasuwan, “Blake Lively Slammed on Social Media after Claiming Cherokee Ancestry in
     L’Oréal Ad,” NBC San Diego, January 13, 2017, https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-
     international/blake-lively-gets-slammed-on-twitter-after-claiming-cherokee-ancestry-in-loreal-
     ad/2061610.
145. Joshua Jamerson, “Elizabeth Warren Apologizes for DNA Test, Identifying as Native American,”
     Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/elizabeth-warren-again-
     apologizes-after-release-of-native-american-ancestry-link-11566241904.
146. Jen Deerinwater, “How White Feminists Fail as Native Allies in the Trump Era,” Establishment, May
     23, 2017, https://theestablishment.co/how-white-feminists-fail-as-native-allies-in-the-trump-era-
     d353d87b8059/index.html.
147. Ibid.
148. Jen Deerinwater, “America’s Conversation on Sexual Assault Is a Failure if It Ignores Native Women,”
     Medium, October 31, 2016, https://medium.com/the-establishment/americas-conversation-on-
     sexual-assault-is-a-failure-if-it-ignores-native-women-b0c0cbec699e.
149. Sam Levin, “At Standing Rock, Women Lead Fight in Face of Mace, Arrests and Strip Searches,”
     Guardian, November 4, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/dakota-access-
     pipeline-protest-standing-rock-women-police-abuse.
150. Carmen Rios, “If We Divide, We Don’t Conquer: 3 Reasons Why Feminists Need to Talk About
     Race,” Everyday Feminism, February 1, 2015, https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/02/feminists-talk-
     about-race/.
151. Dolores DeGiacomo, “Divide and Conquer: Feminist Style and Why Patricia Arquette Is Right,”
     Ellevate, https://www.ellevatenetwork.com/articles/6043-divide-and-conquer-feminist-style-and-why-
     patricia-arquette-is-right.
152. Lisa Hix, “Women Who Conquered the Comics World,” Collectors Weekly, September 15, 2014,
     https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/women-who-conquered-the-comics-world/.
153. Jenny Kutner, “The Woman Who Conquered Porn: How Jacky S. James Became the Most Important
     Name
     in
     the
     Business,”
     Salon,
     January
     5,
     2015,
     https://www.salon.com/2015/01/05/the_woman_who_conquered_porn_how_jacky_st_james_beca
     me_the_most_important_name_in_the_business/.
154. Alice Vincent, “How Feminism Conquered Pop Culture,” Telegraph, December 30, 2014,
     https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/11310119/feminism-pop-culture-2014.html.
155. Aja Romano, “How Female Characters Existing and Doing Stuff Became a Modern Feminist
     Statement,” Vox, February 13, 2017, https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/13/14549738/strong-
     female-characters-feminist-icons.
156. “The Case,” This Land (podcast), June 3, 2019, https://crooked.com/podcast/this-land-episode-1-the-
     case/. Quoted material can be heard around 5:30 mark.
     Chapter Four
157. “The Suffrage Movement,” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism/The-
     suffrage-movement.
158. Lib Tietjen, “Keeping Kosher in 17th Century New York City,” Lower East Side Tenement Museum,
     https://www.tenement.org/blog/meet-assar-levy-new-yorks-first-kosher-butcher/.
159. Marjorie Ingall, “Lessons from the Kosher Meat Boycott,” Tablet, May 6, 2019,
     https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/lessons-from-the-kosher-meat-boycott.
160. Ibid.
161. Ibid.
162. Ibid.
163. Damon Mitchell, “These 1930s Housewives Were the Godmothers of Radical Consumer Activism,”
     Narratively, September 26, 2018, https://narratively.com/these-1930s-housewives-were-the-
     godmothers-of-radical-consumer-activism/.
164. Ibid.
165. Ian Webster, “$65,000 in 1935 Is Worth $1,233,187.59 Today,” In2013Dollars.com,
     http://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1935?amount=65000.
166. Mitchell, “These 1930s Housewives.”
167. Ibid.
168. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 268.
169. Ibid.
170. Ibid., 269.
171. United Press, “Housewives Boycott Meat,” New York Times, May 25, 1951,
     https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1951/05/25/84846217.html?
     action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=LedeAsset&region=ArchiveBody&pgtype=arti
     cle&pageNumber=33.
172. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 269.
173. United Press, “Housewives Boycott Meat.”
     18.
     Bill
     Ganzel,
     “Food
     Price
     Hikes,”
     Living
     History
     Farm,
     2009,
     https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe70s/money_03.html.
174. Paul L. Montgomery, “Consumers Hold Rallies at Shops on Eve of Boycott,” New York Times, April
     1, 1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/01/archives/front-page-1-no-title-consumers-rally-at-
     shops-on-eve-of-meat.html.
175. Barry Meier, “A Friend of the Consumer Says She Will Keep Fighting,” New York Times, October 26,
     1991,
     https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/26/news/a-friend-of-the-consumer-says-she-will-keep-
     fighting.html.
176. Debra Michals, PhD, ed., “Dolores Huerta,” National Women’s History Museum, 2015,
     https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/dolores-huerta.
177. Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite, “How ‘Citizen Housewives’ Made Food Cheaper and Safer,” Atlantic,
     November 5, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/citizen-housewives-
     consumer-twarog/544772/.
178. Catherine Fosl, “‘There Was No Middle Ground’: Anne Braden and the Southern Social Justice
     Movement,”
     NWSA
     Journal
     11,
     no.
     3
     (Autumn
     1999):
     24–48,
     https://www.jstor.org/stable/4316680?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.
     24.
     “Anne
     Braden,”
     Americans
     Who
     Tell
     the
     Truth,
     https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/anne-braden.
179. Ibid.
180. [[TK]]
181. “Juliette Hampton Morgan: A White Woman Who Understood,” Teaching Tolerance,
     https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/tolerance-lessons/juliette-hampton-morgan-a-white-
     woman-who-understood.
182. Melissa Brown, “Montgomery Librarian Juliette Morgan Remembered for Civil Rights Stand,”
     Montgomery
     Advertiser,
     February
     21,
     2018,
     https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2018/02/21/montgomery-librarian-juliette-
     morgan-remembered-civil-rights-stand/355705002/.
183. “Juliette Hampton Morgan: A White Woman Who Understood.”
184. Ibid.
185. Brown, “Montgomery Librarian Juliette Morgan.”
186. Allida M. Black, “Smith, Lillian (1897–1966),” Encyclopedia.com, October 24, 2020,
     https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/smith-lillian-
     1897-1966.
187. Ellen J. Goldner and Safiya Henderson-Holmes, eds., Racing & (E)Racing Language: Living with the
     Color of Our Words (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 100.
188. McKay Jenkins, The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (Chapel Hill:
     University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 122.
189. Eileen Boris, “‘Arm and Arm’: Racialized Bodies and Colored Lines,” Journal of American Studies 35,
     no. 1 (April 2001): 1–20, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27556906?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.
190. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White
     Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
191. Mab Segrest, Memoirs of a Race Traitor (New York: New Press, 2019), 7.
192. Mary Lou Breslin, “Celebrating Kitty Cone: 1944–2015,” Disability Rights Education & Defense
     Fund, 2015, https://dredf.org/2015/03/25/celebrating-kitty-cone-1944-2015/.
193. Andrew Grim, “Sitting-In for Disability Rights: The Section 504 Protests of the 1970s,” O Say Can
     You See? (blog), National Museum of American History, July 8, 2015,
     https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/sitting-disability-rights-section-504-protests-1970s.
194. Ibid.
195. “Rehabilitation Act,” US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Disability Rights Section,
     February 2020, https://www.ada.gov/cguide.htm#anchor65610.
196. Kitty Cone, “Short History of the 504 Sit In,” Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund,
     https://dredf.org/504-sit-in-20th-anniversary/short-history-of-the-504-sit-in/.
197. Ibid.
198. Britta Shoot, “The 1977 Disability Rights Protest That Broke Records and Changed Laws,” Atlas
     Obscura, November 9, 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/504-sit-in-san-francisco-1977-
     disability-rights-advocacy.
199. Arielle Milkman, “The Radical Origins of Free Breakfast for Children,” Eater, February 16, 2016,
     https://www.eater.com/2016/2/16/11002842/free-breakfast-schools-black-panthers.
200. Grim, “Sitting-In for Disability Rights.”
201. Cone, “Short History of the 504 Sit In.”
202. Ibid.
     Chapter Five
203. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 166.
204. George Rede, “Oregon’s Domestic Workers Gain Labor Protections as Gov. Kate Brown Signs New
     Law,”
     Oregonian,
     January
     9,
     2019,
     https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2015/06/oregons_domestic_workers_gain.html.
205. “More About the Bill,” Connecticut, National Domestic Workers Alliance,
     https://www.domesticworkers.org/bill-of-rights/connecticut%E2%80%8B.
206. “Why the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights Is Good For…” Massachusetts, National Domestic
     Workers Alliance, https://www.domesticworkers.org/bill-of-rights/massachusetts.
207. “Why the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights Is Good For…” Illinois, National Domestic Workers
     Alliance, https://www.domesticworkers.org/bill-of-rights/illinois.
     Chapter Six
208. Liesl Schillinger, “A Woman’s Fantasy in Modern Reality,” New York Times, December 18, 2013,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/fashion/Fear-of-Flying-Erica-Jong.html.
209. “The Second Wave of Feminism,” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism/The-
     second-wave-of-feminism.
210. Joan Didion, “The Women’s Movement,” New York Times, July 30, 1972,
     https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/07/30/81928871.pdf?
     pdf_redirect=true&ip=0.
211. “About Ms.” Ms., https://msmagazine.com/about/.
212. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ms,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ms.
213. Barbaralee D. Diamonstein, “‘We Have Had Abortions,” Ms., spring 1972,
     http://images.nymag.com/images/2/promotional/11/11/week1/mrs-abortionsb.pdf.
214. Abigail Pogrebin, “How Do You Spell Ms.?” Cut, March 25, 2019,
     https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/gloria-steinem-ms-magazine-history.html.
215. Diamonstein, “‘We Have Had Abortions.”
216. Paul Alexander, “The Feminine Force,” Boston Globe, February 9, 2013,
     https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/02/09/years-after-her-death-sylvia-plath-feminine-
     force-lives/laRVqkRs2etZkp5sJB0ZwI/story.html.
217. “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (Paperback),” Waterstones,
     https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-dream-of-a-common-language/adrienne-
     rich/9780393346008.
218. “A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde,” Act Build Change, https://actbuildchange.com/books/a-burst-of-
     light/.
219. Anne Janette Johnson, “Lorde, Audre 1934–1992,” Encyclopedia.com, October 18, 2020,
     https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-miscellaneous-biographies/audre-lorde.
220. “A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde.”
221. Emily Harnett, “Doris Lessing’s ‘The Fifth Child’ and the Spectre of the Ambivalent Mother,” New
     Yorker, May 11, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/doris-lessings-the-fifth-child-
     and-the-spectre-of-the-ambivalent-mother.
222. Lara Feigel, “The Parent Trap: Can You Be a Good Writer and a Good Parent?” Guardian, February
     24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/24/writers-parenting-doris-lessing-lara-
     feigel.
223. “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edna-st-
     vincent-millay.
224. Hugh Ryan, “How Dressing in Drag Was Labeled a Crime in the 20th Century,” History.com, June
     28, 2019, https://www.history.com/news/stonewall-riots-lgbtq-drag-three-article-rule.
225. Marsha Dubrow, “National Portrait Gallery Looks at Marlene Dietrich, Icon of Androgynous
     Glamour,” DCist, June 16, 2017, https://dcist.com/story/17/06/16/marlene-dietrich/.
226. Kristen Page-Kirby, “5 photos that prove Marlene Dietrich never gave into the haters,” Washington
     Post, June 15, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/06/15/5-photos-that-prove-
     marlene-dietrich-never-gave-into-the-haters/.
227. Bridey Heing, “Marlene Dietrich: The Femme Fatale Who Fought Social and Sexual Oppression,”
     CNN, June 19, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/marlene-dietrich-dressed-for-the-
     image/index.html.
228. Ibid.
229. Dubrow, “National Portrait Gallery Looks at Marlene Dietrich.”
     Chapter Seven
230. Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: A Story of Women and Economics (New York:
     Pegasus Books, 2016), 125.
231. Casey Hayden and Mary King, “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo,” History Is a Weapon, paper
     originally published 1965, https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/sexcaste.html.
232. Ibid.
233. Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism, 91.
234. Ibid., 92.
235. Jacqueline Howard, “US Fertility Rate Is Below Level Needed to Replace Population, Study Says,”
     CNN, January 10, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/10/health/us-fertility-rate-replacement-cdc-
     study/index.html.
236. Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, 166, 167.
237. Mothers were early and highly engaged adopters of social media, reportedly in 2011, because they were
     trying to build a community: Maeve Duggan, Amanda Lenhart, Cliff Lampe, and Nicole B. Ellison,
     “Parents
     and
     Social
     Media,”
     Pew
     Research
     Center,
     July
     16,
     2015,
     https://www.pewinternet.org/2015/07/16/parents-and-social-media/.
238. Jessica Bennett, “I Am (an Older) Woman. Hear Me Roar.” New York Times, January 8, 2019,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/style/women-age-glenn-close.html.
239. Rosemarie Tong and Howard Lintz, “A Feminist Analysis of the Abuse and Neglect of Elderly
     Women,” in Wanda Teays, ed., Analyzing Violence Against Women (Cham, Switzerland: Springer,
     2019), 167–76.
240. Feminists didn’t actually do this: Karen Heller, “The Bra-Burning Feminist Trope Started at Miss
     America. Except, That’s Not What Really Happened.” Washington Post, September 7, 2018,
     https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/07/the-bra-burning-feminist-trope-
     started-at-miss-america-except-thats-not-what-really-happened/.
241. Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, vi.
242. Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 96.
243. Linda Burnham and Nik Theodore, Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of
     Domestic Work (New York: National Domestic Workers Alliance, 2012).
244. Ai-jen Poo, “The Invisible World of Nannies, Housekeepers and Caregivers,” Time, November 27,
     2012, https://ideas.time.com/2012/11/27/why-domestic-workers-need-a-bill-of-rights/.
245. Lillian Agbeyegbe, Sara Crowe, Brittany Anthony, Elizabeth Gerrior, and Catherine Chen, Human
     Trafficking at Home: Labor Trafficking of Domestic Workers (New York: Polaris and the National
     Domestic
     Workers
     Alliance),
     https://www.domesticworkers.org/sites/default/files/Human_Trafficking_at_Home_Labor_Trafficki
     ng_of_Domestic_Workers.pdf.
246. Ibid.
247. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 165.
248. Ibid., 166.
249. Ibid. Sadly, these bureaus were discontinued when the US government shifted resources at the start of
     World War II.
     Chapter Eight
250. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 88.
251. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch,” Britannica.com,
     https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harriot-Eaton-Stanton-Blatch.
252. Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the American
     Political Traditions (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 210–11.
253. Editors, “Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch.”
254. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 158.
255. Ibid., 159.
256. Ibid., 165.
257. Ibid.
258. Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism, 187.
259. Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, 61.
260. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In (New York: Knopf, 2013), 9.
261. Gary Gutting and Nancy Fraser, “A Feminism Where ‘Lean In’ Means Leaning on Others,” New York
     Times, October 15, 2015, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/a-feminism-where-
     leaning-in-means-leaning-on-others/.
     13.
     Susan
     Wojcicki,
     tweet,
     January
     27,
     2016,
     https://twitter.com/SusanWojcicki/status/692482490867539970.
262. Alice Truong, “When Google Increased Paid Maternity Leave, the Rate at Which New Mothers Quit
     Dropped 50%,” Quartz.com, January 28, 2016, https://qz.com/604723/when-google-increased-paid-
     maternity-leave-the-rate-at-which-new-mothers-quit-dropped-50/.
263. Sasha Bronner, “Chrissy Teigen Doesn’t Care About Her Nip Slip: ‘A Nipple Is a Nipple Is a
     Nipple,’” HuffPost, October 11, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chrissy-teigen-nip-
     slip_n_5968400.
264. Julie Sprankles, “Feminists Unite in 2013: 20 Most Inspiring Quotes,” SheKnows, December 18,
     2013, https://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/1026129/feminists-unite-in-2013-20-most-
     inspiring-quotes/.
265. Jason Sheeler, “Kerry Washington: The Gladiator,” Glamour, October 30, 2013,
     https://www.glamour.com/story/kerry-washington.
     Chapter Nine
266. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
     of Color (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 132.
267. Ibid.
268. Ibid., 130.
269. Ibid., 125.
270. Carla Trujillo, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Berkeley, CA: Third
     Woman Press, 1994), x.
271. Cristina Herrera, “‘The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About’: Rejection, Redemption, and the
     Lesbian Daughter in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings,” Women’s Studies 39, no. 1 (2009): 18–36.
272. Yvette Saavedra, “Chicana Schism: The Relationship between Chicana Feminist and Chicana Feminist
     Lesbians,” presented at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Annual
     Conference,
     April
     1,
     2001,
     https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
     referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1033&context=naccs.
273. Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: New York
     University Press, 2011), 152.
274. Marilyn Wann, “Big Deal: You Can Be Fat and Fit,” CNN, January 3, 2013,
     https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/03/opinion/wann-fat-and-fit-study/index.html.
275. Ibid.
276. Farrell, Fat Shame, 154.
277. “Don’t Buy the Lie!” FAT!SO?, http://www.fatso.com/dont-buy-the-lie.html.
278. Farrell, Fat Shame, 64.
279. Jesse Hamlin, “The Scene: A Burlesque Show That Fills the Stage/It’s Not Over until the Fat Lady
     Strips,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 2002, https://www.sfgate.com/default/article/THE-
     SCENE-A-burlesque-show-that-fills-the-stage-2828935.php.
280. Ibid.
281. Farrell, Fat Shame, 155.
     Chapter Ten
282. Alessandra Malito, “Women Are About to Control a Massive Amount of Wealth but Can’t Find
     Anyone to Manage It,” MarketWatch, May 15, 2017, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/women-
     are-about-to-control-a-massive-amount-of-wealth-but-cant-find-anyone-to-manage-it-2017-05-12.
283. Katie Mettler, “Hillary Clinton Just Said It, but ‘The Future Is Female’ Began as a 1970s Lesbian
     Separatist
     Slogan,”
     Washington
     Post,
     February
     8,
     2017,
     https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/08/hillary-clinton-just-said-it-
     but-the-future-is-female-began-as-a-1970s-lesbian-separatist-slogan/?utm_term=.58cfccffffbe.
284. “The Future Is Female: Search Term,” Google Trends, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?
     date=all&geo=US&q=The%20future%20is%20female.
285. Marisa Meltzer, “A Feminist T-Shirt Resurfaces from the ’70s,” New York Times, November 18, 2015,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/a-feminist-t-shirt-resurfaces-from-the-70s.html.
286. Ibid.
287. Ibid.
288. Ibid.
289. Nora Whelan, “Feminist T-Shirts That Are Just Slightly Off,” Racked, September 29, 2017,
     https://www.racked.com/2017/9/29/16363226/future-is-female-t-shirts-knockoff.
290. Jeffrey Hayzlett, “Why the (Entrepreneurial) Future Is Female,” Entrepreneur, December 15, 2017,
     https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/306131.
291. Emma Thomasson, “Puma Sees ‘Female Future’ Helped by Rihanna Designs,” Reuters, February 18,
     2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-puma-results-idUSKCN0VR0XO.
292. Emily K. Graham, The Future Is Female (FleishmanHillard and Money 20/20, 2019),
     https://fleishmanhillard.com/wp-content/uploads/meta/resource-file/2019/the-future-is-female-a-
     report-with-money-20-20-usa-1549463067.pdf.
293. Kevin Sessums, “Meet Our 2017 Fresh Faces,” Marie Claire, April 10, 2017,
     https://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/a26335/fresh-faces-2017/.
294. Janell Hobson, ed., Are All the Women Still White?: Rethinking Race, Expanding Feminisms (New
     York: State University of New York Press, 2017), 97.
295. Matthew A. Postal, Gay Activists Alliance Firehouse (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission,
     June 18, 2019).
296. Hobson, Are All the Women Still White?, 97.
297. Ibid., 96.
298. Ibid.
299. Ibid., 94.
300. Ibid., 95.
301. Ibid., 96.
302. Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising That Changed
     America (New York: Penguin, 1993), 236.
303. Eric Marcus, Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights (New
     York: HarperCollins, 2002), 156.
304. “Get in Touch,” Faces of Freedom, https://www.facesoffreedom.org/calliope-wong/#contact.
305. Natalie DiBlasio, “Smith College Rejects Transgender Applicant,” USA Today, March 22, 2013,
     https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/22/smith-college-transgender-
     rejected/2009047/.
306. Ibid.
307. Susan Donaldson James, “All-Female Smith College Returns Transgender Woman’s Admissions
     Application,” ABC News, March 25, 2013, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/female-smith-college-
     returns-transgender-womans-admissions-application/story?id=18805681.
308. DiBlasio, “Smith College Rejects Transgender Applicant.”
     28.
     “15th
     Annual
     Dorothy
     Awards:
     Honorees,”
     New
     Haven
     Pride
     Center,
     https://web.archive.org/web/20190227212729/http://www.dorothyawards.com/speaker-
     lineup/rising-star-calliope-wong/.
309. “Adopt a Trans Women Inclusive Admissions Policy!” petition, Change.org,
     https://www.change.org/p/smith-college-board-of-trustees-adopt-a-trans-women-inclusive-
     admissions-policy.
310. Editorial Board, “Transgender Students at Women’s Colleges,” New York Times, May 5, 2015,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/opinion/transgender-students-at-womens-colleges.html.
311. Ari Nussbaum, “Mills Reacts to Transgender Admissions Policy,” Campanil, September 5, 2014,
     http://www.thecampanil.com/mills-reacts-to-transgender-admissions-policy/.
312. Ibid.
     Part II: White FeminismTM
313. Finnegan, Selling Suffrage, 174.
     Chapter Eleven
314. Allison Corneau, “Jessica Alba: Why I Love Being a Female CEO, Running My Own Business,” Us
     Weekly, November 17, 2014, https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/jessica-alba-why-i-
     love-being-a-female-ceo-20141711/.
315. Sarah LeTrent, “GoldieBlox Rages against the Princess Machine,” CNN, November 21, 2013,
     https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/20/living/goldieblox-ad-toys-girls.
316. Adi Robertson, “How Feminism and Commercialism Combined to Make ‘Camp Gyno’ a Viral Hit,”
     Verge, August 2, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/2/4583008/feminism-commercialism-
     combine-to-make-camp-gyno-a-viral-hit.
317. Hermione Hoby, “Taylor Swift: ‘Sexy? Not on My Radar,’” Guardian, August 23, 2014,
     https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/23/taylor-swift-shake-it-off.
318. Jessica Valenti, “Taylor Swift in the Blank Space Video Is the Woman We’ve Been Waiting For,”
     Guardian, November 11, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/11/taylor-
     swift-blank-space-video-woman-boy-crazy?CMP=share_btn_tw.
319. Megan Reynolds, “What Will We Wear for the Resistance?” Jezebel, December 26, 2017,
     https://themuse.jezebel.com/what-will-we-wear-for-the-resistance-1821233416.
320. Tracy Clark-Flory, “#Feminism Is Now a Ball Pit of Boobs, I Guess,” Jezebel, August 6, 2018,
     https://jezebel.com/feminism-is-now-a-ball-pit-of-boobs-i-guess-1828061640.
321. Sarah Sophie Flicker, “A Women’s March Organizer on the Feminist Power of Red Lipstick,”
     Glamour, May 31, 2018, https://www.glamour.com/story/red-lipstick-feminism.
322. Megan Reynolds, “Refinery29’s Money Diaries Aren’t the ‘Revolution’ They Promise,” Jezebel, July
     19, 2018, https://jezebel.com/refinery29s-money-diaries-arent-the-revolution-they-pro-1827697912.
323. Ashley Lee, “Inside Cosmopolitan’s Weekend Conference, NBC Comedy: ‘It’s a Great Time to Be a
     Young
     Woman,’”
     Hollywood
     Reporter,
     November
     5,
     2014,
     https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cosmopolitan-fun-fearless-life -conference-746583.
324. “This Is the Most Amazing Two-Day Event You Will Ever Go to in Your Life,” Cosmopolitan, October
     26, 2014, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/news/a31906/fun-fearless-life-event/.
325. “Racial Wealth Divide Snapshot: Women and the Racial Wealth Divide,” Prosperity Now, March 29,
     2018, https://prosperitynow.org/blog/racial-wealth-divide-snapshot-women-and-racial-wealth-divide.
326. Ibid.
327. Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018),
     149.
328. Christine Haughney and Leslie Kaufman, “The Rise of Conferences on Women’s Empowerment,”
     New York Times, October 6, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/business/media/womens-
     conferences-become-a-growing-media-marketing-tool.html.
329. Finnegan, Selling Suffrage, 143.
330. “A New Era Is Coming Soon,” The Wing.
331. Molly Bennet, “Inside the Gig Economy’s New Wave of Women’s Clubs,” Village Voice, June 6, 2017,
     https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/06/06/inside-the-gig-economys-new-wave-of-womens-clubs/.
332. Noël Duan, “Women-Only Clubs Are Spreading as a Grassroots Movement,” Quartz.com, November
     19,
     2017,
     https://qz.com/quartzy/1130921/the-magic-of-women-only-clubs-is-spreading-as-a-
     grassroots-movement/.
333. Erica Pearson, “The Rise of Women-Only Coworking Spaces,” Week, April 23, 2018,
     https://theweek.com/articles/759527/rise-womenonly-coworking-spaces.
334. Michael Chandler, “Female-Focused Co-Working Spaces Offer Career and Child-Care Help Still
     Lacking in Many Traditional Workplaces,” Washington Post, February 21, 2018,
     https://beta.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/new-co-working-spaces-offer-women-the-kind-
     of-career-and-child-care-help-still-lacking-in-many-traditional-workplaces/2018/02/20/34639a86-
     1282-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html?outputType=amp.
     22.
     “Feminist
     Embroidered
     Espadrilles
     Smoking
     Slippers,”
     Bergdorf
     Goodman,
     https://www.bergdorfgoodman.com/p/soludos-feminist-embroidered-espadrilles-smoking-slippers-
     prod144470014?
     ecid=BGCS__GooglePLA&utm_source=google_shopping&adpos=1o3&scid=scplpsku114250071
     &sc_intid=sku114250071&gclid=Cj0KCQjwt_nmBRD0ARIsAJYs6o35EAk2w8A5Zb-
     xYHWft6xOY121AZ_04tiHtxrWVQI0rmX6t1ZD0RIaAiFmEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds.
335. Megan Angelo, “The Lady Boss: Mindy Kaling,” Glamour, November 5, 2014,
     https://www.glamour.com/story/mindy-kaling.
336. Lauren Brown, “9 Celebrities You Didn’t Know Have Side Hustles,” Glamour, August 8, 2016,
     https://www.glamour.com/story/9-celebrities-you-didnt-know-have-side-hustles.
337. Justine Carreon, “10 Wardrobe Staples That Will Make You Look and Feel Like a Boss,” Elle, January
     3, 2018, https://www.elle.com/fashion/g8134/work-clothes-for-women/.
338. Lauren Adhav and Alexis Bennett, “24 Best Candle Brands That Are Worth Setting Your Money on
     Fire,” Cosmopolitan, July 14, 2020, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/g27912682/best-candle-
     brands/.
339. Lauren Alexis Fisher, “Boss Lady: 15 Chic Desktop Accessories,” Harper’s Bazaar, January 15, 2016,
     https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/interiors-entertaining/advice/g4085/chic-desktop-
     accessories/.
340. Victoria Ontman, “Got a Skype Interview? 8 Video-Friendly Looks Guaranteed to Seal the Deal,”
     Vogue, May 24, 2016, https://www.vogue.com/article/skype-video-job-interview-business-meeting-
     what-to-wear.
341. Dani Blum, “Here’s How to Stop Procrastinating, Because You Know You Do It All the Damn
     Time,” Cosmopolitan, March 7, 2019, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/a26678553/how-to-
     stop-procrastinating/.
342. Kim Quindlen, “The 5 Best Cell Phone Stands Because Not Every Day Has to Be Arm Day,” Bustle,
     April 20, 2018, https://www.bustle.com/p/the-5-best-cell-phone-stands-8843834.
343. Joan C. Williams and Rachel W. Dempsey, “The Rise of Executive Feminism,” Harvard Business
     Review, March 28, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/03/the-rise-of-executive-feminism.
344. Kelly Anne Bonner, “5 Email Hacks That Will Boost Your Productivity in a Big Way,” Refinery29,
     February 27, 2017, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/best-google-chrome-extensions.
345. Jennifer Breheny Wallace, “Struggling with Your To-Do List? Try These Tricks to Be More
     Productive,” Glamour, July 11, 2016, https://www.glamour.com/story/struggling-with-your-to-do-
     list-try-these-tricks-to-be-more-productive.
346. Emily Mason, “8 Productivity Apps to Help You Get Your Life Together,” Marie Claire, December
     11, 2018, https://www.marieclaire.com/home/g25360091/best-productivity-apps/.
347. Marlen Komar, “How to Become the Most Productive Person You Know,” Bustle, April 13, 2016,
     https://www.bustle.com/articles/154425-11-tips-to-become-the-most-productive-person-you-know.
348. Sheryl Sandberg, “Why You Should Embrace Your Power,” Cosmopolitan, October 15, 2014,
     https://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/a32066/embrace-your-power-sheryl-sandberg/.
349. Sandberg, Lean In, 48.
350. Ibid., 47.
351. Ibid., 95.
352. Ibid., 102.
353. Ibid., 9.
354. Michelle Goldberg, “The Absurd Backlash against Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In,’” Daily Beast, July 11,
     2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-absurd-backlash-against-sheryl-sandbergs-lean-in.
355. Marcus Noland, Tyler Moran, and Barbara Kotschwar, “Is Gender Diversity Profitable? Evidence
     from a Global Survey,” Working Paper Series, Peterson Institute for International Economics,
     February 2016, https://www.piie.com/publications/wp/wp16-3.pdf.
356. Ibid.
357. Vivian Hunt, Dennis Layton, and Sara Prince, “Why Diversity Matters,” McKinsey & Company,
     January 1, 2015, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-
     diversity-matters.
358. Ibid.
359. Valentina Zarya, “New Proof That More Female Bosses Equals Higher Profits,” Fortune, February 8,
     2016,
     https://fortune.com/2016/02/08/women-leadership-
     profits/#:~:text=Another%20popular%20piece%20of%20research,53%25%20higher%20return%20on
     %20equity.
360. Lily Herman, “The Cold, Hard Proof That More Women Means Better Business,” TheMuse.com,
     https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-cold-hard-proof-that-more-women-means-better-business.
     Chapter Twelve
361. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
     (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 6, 7.
362. Davis, Women, Race & Class, 6–7.
363. Ibid., 7.
364. Ibid.
365. Ibid., 65.
366. Ibid., 65–66.
367. ILGWU Local 155 Records, collection number 5780/129, Kheel Center for Labor-Management
     Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York,
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368. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 88.
369. Ibid.
370. “Rose Schneiderman’s April 2, 1911, Speech,” Jewish Women’s Archive,
     https://jwa.org/media/excerpt-from-rose-schneidermans-april-2-1911-speech.
371. Kaila Hale-Stern, “Listen to ‘Bread and Roses,’ the Song That Defined the Women’s Labor
     Movement,” TheMarySue.com, March 8, 2017, https://www.themarysue.com/bread-and-roses-the-
     womens-labor-movement/.
372. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 92.
373. Ibid., 94–95.
374. Ellen Willis, “Economic Reality and the Limits of Feminism,” Ms., June 1973.
375. Ibid.
376. Ibid.
377. Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South,”
     May, 1974.
378. Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All
     the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, 2nd ed. (New York: Feminist
     Press, 2015).
379. bell hooks, “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In,” Feminist Wire, October 28, 2013,
     https://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/.
380. Ibid.
     Chapter Thirteen
381. Lauren Strapagiel, “Attention, Advertisers: Lesbians Buy Stuff, Too,” BuzzFeed, September 2, 2020,
     https://www.buzzfeed.com/laurenstrapagiel/shut-up-and-take-my-gay-money.
382. Center for American Progress and Movement Advancement Project, Paying an Unfair Price: The
     Financial Penalty for LGBT Women in America (Center for American Progress and Movement
     Advancement Project, March 2015).
383. Ibid.
384. Yu Zhang, “LGBT-Owned Business: Stats and Facts,” Donald W. Reynolds National Center for
     Business Journalism, March 6, 2017, https://businessjournalism.org/2017/03/lgbt-owned-business-
     stats-and-facts/.
385. “Get Certified as an LGBT Business Enterprise Today!” National LGBT Chamber of Commerce,
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386. Zhang, “LGBT-Owned Business.”
387. Rae Binstock, “Why Lesbian Spaces Will Always Be in Danger of Closing, and Why Some Will Always
     Survive,” Slate, December 20, 2016, https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/12/why-do-lesbian-
     spaces-have-such-a-hard-time-staying-in-business.html.
388. Emrah Kovacoglu, “False Rumor: We Are Not Shutting Down!” AfterEllen, September 21, 2016,
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389. “Herstory of the Dyke March,” NYC Dyke March, https://www.nycdykemarch.com/herstory.
     10.
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     Day,
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     Reader,
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     3,
     2019,
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390. Hilary Weaver, “At the N.Y.C. Dyke March, Where There’s Way More to Pride Than the Parade,”
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391. Rashmee Kumar, “Marketing the Muslim Woman: Hijabs and Modest Fashion Are the New
     Corporate
     Trend
     in
     the
     Trump
     Era,”
     Intercept,
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392. Ibid.
393. “How Americans Feel About Religious Groups,” Pew Research Center, July 16, 2014,
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394. Katayoun Kishi, “Assaults against Muslims in U.S. Surpass 2001 Level,” Pew Research Center,
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     in-u-s-surpass-2001-level/.
395. Kelly Weill, “More Than 500 Attacks on Muslims in America This Year,” Daily Beast, May 21, 2019,
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396. Shelina Janmohamed, “Wake Up to the Power of Female Muslim Consumers,” Campaign, May 9,
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397. “1. Demographic Portrait of Muslim Americans,” Pew Research Center, July 26, 2017,
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398. “How Americans Feel About Religious Groups.”
399. Nesrine Malik, “Thanks, L’Oréal, but I’m Growing Weary of This Hijab Fetish,” Guardian, January
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400. “1. Demographic Portrait of Muslim Americans.”
401. “Similar Shares of U.S. Muslim Women Say They Always Wear Hijab in Public, Never Wear Hijab-06-
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402. Malik, “Thanks, L’Oréal, but I’m Growing Weary of This Hijab Fetish.”
403. Kumar, “Marketing the Muslim Woman.”
404. “Gender Based Violence in the GAP Garment Supply Chain,” Global Labor Justice,
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405. “Gender Based Violence in the H&M Garment Supply Chain,” Global Labor Justice,
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406. Gethin Chamberlain, “India’s Clothing Workers: ‘They Slap Us and Call Us Dogs and Donkeys,’”
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407. Hoda Katebi, “If You Use Our Faces Maybe Stop Killing Our People?” Hoda Katebi.com, March 5,
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408. Hoda Katebi, “About,” HodaKatebi.com, https://hodakatebi.com/about/.
409. https://web.archive.org/web/20200628032852/http://www.joojooazad.com /p/boycott-list.html.
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410. Jenna Goudreau, “Back to the Stone Age? New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Bans Working from
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411. Matt Phillips, “Marissa Mayer: ‘I Don’t Think That I Would Consider Myself a Feminist,’ ”
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412. John Carreyrou, “Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled with Its Blood-Test Technology,” Wall Street
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413. Mattie Kahn, “Before We Rush to Take Down Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes…” Elle, October 20, 2015,
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414. Pete Schroeder, “Theranos and Its Founder Settle U.S. Fraud Charges: SEC,” Reuters, March 14,
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415. James Doubek, “SEC Charges Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes with ‘Elaborate, Years-Long
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416. Christine Emba, “The Women Failed by Theranos’s CEO,” Washington Post, March 15, 2018,
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417. 50edai, Instagram post, October 30, 2018, https://www.instagram.com/p/BpkIZ5wAkAH/?
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420. femmecabal, Instagram post, October 30, 2018, https://www.instagram.com/p/BpkNC5QlvCZ/?
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423. Susan Bordo, M. Christina Alcalde, and Ellen Rosenman, eds., Provocations: A Transnational Reader
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424. Finnegan, Selling Suffrage, 109.
425. Cintia Frencia and Daniel Gaido, “The Socialist Origins of International Women’s Day,” Jacobin,
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426. Susan Devaney, “These Products Are Supporting International Women’s Day in the Best Way,” Vogue,
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427. Ariana Marsh, “These International Women’s Day Beauty Products Will Let You Shop for Progress,”
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428. Marci Robin, “Reese Witherspoon and Elizabeth Arden Launched a Lipstick to Support Worldwide
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429. Thatiana Diaz, “Sofia Vergara Launches ‘Empowered by Business’ Campaign on International
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430. Noreen Malone, “Panty Raid,” Cut, 2016, https://www.thecut.com/2016/01/thinx-miki-agrawal-c-v-
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431. Thinx, blog homepage, http://www.shethinx.com/blogs/periodical.
432. “Our Shared Shelf,” GoodReads, https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/179584-our-shared-shelf.
433. Malone, “Panty Raid.”
434. Ibid.
435. Richard Feloni, “How Nasty Gal’s Sophia Amoruso Is Making Feminism Cool Again,” Business
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436. Sophia Amoruso, #Girlboss (London: Portfolio, 2014), 15.
437. Evie Nagy, “The Secrets of a Nasty Gal,” Fast Company, March 25, 2014,
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438. Jackie VanderBrug, “The Global Rise of Female Entrepreneurs,” Harvard Business Review, September
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439. Kerrie MacPherson, “On Women’s Entrepreneurship Day—It’s Time to Fund to Scale,” Forbes,
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440. Tom Watson, “Women Entrepreneurs Get Their ‘Day’—Encouraging a Gender Lens on Shopping
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441. New York Magazine, tweet, May 6, 2014, https://twitter.com/nymag/status/463667106320748544.
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444. Tori Telfer, “Books Alone Won’t Fix Women’s Workplace Problems,” Bustle, May 30, 2014,
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445. Miki Agrawal, “Confessions of an Underwear Activist,” YouTube, January 3, 2014,
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446. Malone, “Panty Raid.”
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447. Roger Parloff, “This CEO Is Out for Blood,” Fortune, June 12, 2014,
     http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/.
448. Jill Krasny, “It’s Been a Banner Year for Nasty Gal’s ‘Girl Boss,’” Inc., November 20, 2014,
     https://www.inc.com/jill-krasny/why-2014-was-breakout-year-for-nasty-gal.html.
449. Anna Merlan, “Lawsuit: Nasty Gal’s #GIRLBOSS Fired Employees for Getting Pregnant,” Jezebel,
     June 9, 2015, https://jezebel.com/lawsuit-nastygals-girlboss-fired-all-her-pregnant-emp-1710042755.
450. Ibid.
451. Ibid.
452. “Nasty Gal: A History of Legal Battles,” Fashion Law, February 3, 2017,
     https://www.thefashionlaw.com/nasty-gal-a-history-of-legal-battles/.
453. Hillary George-Parkin, “Thinx Promised a Feminist Utopia to Everyone but Its Employees,” Vox,
     March 14, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/3/14/14911228/thinx-miki-agrawal-health-care-
     branding.
454. Ibid.
455. Ibid.
456. Ibid.
457. Noreen Malone, “Sexual-Harassment Claims against a ‘She-E.O.,’” Cut, March 20, 2017,
     https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/thinx-employee-accuses-miki-agrawal-of-sexual-harassment.html.
458. Ibid.
459. Ibid.
460. Kathryn Dill, “The 5 Most Shocking Allegations Brought against Former THINX CEO Miki
     Agrawal,” CNBC, March 21, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/5-most-shocking-
     allegations-brought-against-thinx-ex-ceo-miki-agrawal.html.
461. Madeline Stone, “A Former Investment Banker Turned ‘She-E-O’ Launched a ‘Period Underwear’
     Startup—Now the Company Is Embroiled in an Alleged Sexual Harassment Disaster,” Business
     Insider, March 21, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/thinx-founder-miki-agrawal-sexual-
     harassment-claims-2017-3.
462. Miki Agrawal, “My Thinx Ride,” Medium, March 17, 2017, https://medium.com/@mikiagrawal/my-
     thinx-ride-141a738993ee.
463. Miki Agrawal, “An Open Letter to Respectfully Quit Telling Me How to ‘Do Feminism’ (and to Just
     Support One Another, Please!),” Medium, February 5, 2016, https://medium.com/@mikiagrawal/an-
     open-letter-to-respectfully-quit-telling-me-how-to-do-feminism-and-to-just-support-one-
     b8c138f32546.
464. Malone, “Sexual-Harassment Claims against a ‘She-E.O.’ ”
465. This last line was removed from the original post: Agrawal, “My Thinx Ride,”
     https://web.archive.org/web/20181001200757/https://medium.com/@mikiagrawal/my-thinx-ride-
     141a738993ee.
466. Doree Lewak, “Ex-Thinx CEO Ousted for Alleged Sexual Harassment Laughs Off Scandal,” New York
     Post, January 26, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/01/26/ex-thinx-ceo-ousted-for-alleged-sexual-
     harassment-laughs-off-scandal/.
467. Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” blog post, SusanJFowler.com,
     February 19, 2017, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-
     year-at-uber.
468. Ibid.
469. Sara Ashley O’Brien, “Ariana Huffington: Sexual Harassment Isn’t a ‘Systematic Problem’ at Uber,”
     CNN Business, March 23, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/20/technology/arianna-
     huffington-uber-quest-means-business/.
470. Yuki Noguchi, “Uber Fires 20 Employees after Sexual Harassment Claim Investigation,” NPR, June 6,
     2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/06/531806891/uber-fires-20-employees-
     after-sexual-harassment-claim-investigation.
471. Greg Bensinger and Joann S. Lublin, “Uber Fires More Than 20 People in Harassment Investigation,”
     Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-fires-more-than-20-workers-in-
     harassment-investigation-1496774806.
472. Merrit Kennedy, “Details of Uber Harassment Settlement Released,” NPR, August 22, 2018,
     https://www.npr.org/2018/08/22/640900988/dozens-sued-uber-for-harassment-heres-what-they-re-
     set-to-receive.
     Chapter Fifteen
473. Kaitlin Menza, “How I Get It Done: SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan,” Cut, February 25, 2019,
     https://www.thecut.com/2019/02/how-i-get-it-done-soulcycle-ceo-melanie-whelan.html.
474. Indya Brown, “How I Get It Done: Eva Chen,” Cut, December 5, 2018,
     https://www.thecut.com/2018/12/how-i-get-it-done-instagrams-eva-chen.html.
475. Menza, “How I Get It Done: SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan.”
476. A. C. Shilton, “How to Be an Ace Salary Negotiator (Even if You Hate Conflict),” New York Times,
     August
     10,
     2018,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/smarter-living/how-to-negotiate-
     salary.html.
477. Tory Burch, “Don’t Wait for Doors to Open,” LinkedIn, April 21, 2016,
     https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-wait-doors-open-tory-burch.
478. Carol Sankar, “Why Don’t More Women Negotiate?” Forbes, July 13, 2017,
     https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/07/13/why-dont-more-women-
     negotiate/#70aed188e769.
479. Ashley Alese Edwards, “About Half of Millennial Women Don’t Identify as Feminists. Here’s Why.”
     Refinery29, August 14, 2018, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/midterm-election-women-dont-
     identify-as-feminists.
480. Ibid.
481. History.com Editors, “President Woodrow Wilson Picketed by Women Suffragists,” This Day in
     History, History.com, August 26, 2020, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-
     woodrow-wilson-picketed-by-women-suffragists.
482. “Birth Control Pioneer,” Emma Goldman Papers, Berkeley Library, University of California,
     https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/MeetEmmaGoldman/birthcontrolpioneer.html#:~:text=Gol
     dman%20Counsels%20Birth%20Control%20Advocate,in%20her%20magazine%20Woman%20Rebel.
     &text=Upon%20her%20return%2C%20Goldman%20learned,of%20securing%20a%20lighter%20sent
     ence.
483. Allie Jones, “Why You Need a ‘Work Wife,’” Cosmopolitan, September 19, 2018,
     https://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/a23286350/why-you-need-a-work-wife/.
484. Katherine Goldstein, “I Was a Sheryl Sandberg Superfan. Then Her ‘Lean In’ Advice Failed Me.” Vox,
     December 6, 2018, https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/12/6/18128838/michelle-obama-lean-in-
     sheryl-sandberg.
485. Ibid.
486. Jillian D’Onfro and Michelle Castillo, “Google Employees Around the World Are Walking Out Today
     to Protest the Company’s Handling of Sexual Misconduct,” CNBC, November 1, 2018,
     https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/google-employees-walk-out-in-protest-of-sexual-misconduct-
     handling.html.
487. Dominic Rushe, “McDonald’s Workers Walk Out in 10 US Cities Over ‘Sexual Harassment
     Epidemic,’ ”
     Guardian,
     September
     18,
     2018,
     https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/18/mcdonalds-walkout-workers-protest-sexual-
     harassment-epidemic.
488. Hamza Shaban, “McDonald’s Employees Say ‘Time’s Up’ in New Round of Sexual Harassment
     Complaints,”
     Washington
     Post,
     May
     21,
     2019,
     https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/21/mcdonalds-employees-say-times-up-new-
     round-sexual-harassment-complaints/.
489. Goldstein, “I Was a Sheryl Sandberg Superfan.”
     Part III: The Winds of Change
490. Elizabeth Martinez, Matt Meyer, and Mandy Carter, eds., We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism
     and Militarism in 21st Century America (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 101.
     Chapter Sixteen
     1.
     The 2019 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report (American Express, 2019),
     https://about.americanexpress.com/files/doc_library/file/2019-state-of-women-owned-businesses-
     report.pdf.
491. Ibid.
492. Ibid.
493. Dani Matias, “New Report Says Women Will Soon Be Majority of College-Educated U.S. Workers,”
     NPR, June 20, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734408574/new-report-says-college-
     educated-women-will-soon-make-up-majority-of-u-s-labor-f.
494. Laura Haverty, “All the Single Ladies… Are Becoming Homeowners,” NBC News, November 14,
     2018,
     https://www.nbcnews.com/know-your-value/feature/all-single-ladies-are-becoming-
     homeowners-ncna935351.
495. Terence McArdle, “‘Night of Terror’: The Suffragists Who Were Beaten and Tortured for Seeking the
     Vote,”
     Washington
     Post,
     November
     10,
     2017,
     https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/10/night-of-terror-the-suffragists-
     who-were-beaten-and-tortured-for-seeking-the-vote/.
496. Jia Tolentino, “The Somehow Controversial Women’s March on Washington,” New Yorker, January
     18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-somehow-controversial-womens-
     march-on-washington.
497. Daniella Diaz, “Trump Calls Clinton ‘a Nasty Woman,’” CNN, October 20, 2016,
     https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/19/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-nasty-woman/index.html.
498. Amy Chozick and Ashley Parker, “Donald Trump’s Gender-Based Attacks on Hillary Clinton Have
     Calculated
     Risk,”
     New
     York
     Times,
     April
     28,
     2016,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-women.html.
499. Robert Farley, “Fact Check: Trump’s Comments on Women,” USA Today, August 12, 2015,
     https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/08/12/fact-check-trump-comments-
     women-megyn-kelly/31525419/.
500. Adam Withnall, “Donald Trump’s Unsettling Record of Comments About His Daughter Ivanka,”
     Independent, October 10, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-
     elections/donald-trump-ivanka-trump-creepiest-most-unsettling-comments-a-roundup-
     a7353876.html.
501. “Trump: Megyn Kelly Has ‘Blood Coming Out of Her Wherever,’ ” Daily Beast, August 7, 2015,
     https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2015/08/07/trump-megyn-kelly-has-blood-coming-out-of-
     somewhere-else.
502. “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women,” New York Times, October 8, 2016,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html.
503. Tolentino, “The Somehow Controversial Women’s March on Washington.”
     15.
     “Women’s
     March
     on
     Washington,”
     event
     posting,
     Facebook,
     https://www.facebook.com/events/2169332969958991/permalink/2178409449051343/.
504. Ibid.
505. History.com Editors, “Women’s March,” This Day in History, History.com, January 5, 2018,
     https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/womens-march.
506. Ibid.
507. Perry Stein, “Is There a Place at the Women’s March for Women Who Are Politically Opposed to
     Abortion?” Washington Post, January 18, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-
     issues/is-there-a-place-for-anti-abortion-women-at-the-womens-march-on-
     washington/2017/01/17/2e6a2da8-dcbd-11e6-acdf-14da832ae861_story.html.
508. Ibid.
509. Women’s March on Washington, “Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles,”
     https://static1.squarespace.com/static/584086c7be6594762f5ec56e/t/58796773414fb52b57e20794/
     1484351351914/WMW+Guiding+Vision+%26+Definition+of+Principles.pdf.
510. Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel, “Is the Women’s March Melting Down?” Tablet, December 10,
     2018, https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/276694/is-the-womens-march-melting-
     down#amendments.
511. Josefin Dolsten, “A Timeline of the Women’s March Anti-Semitism Controversies,” Jewish
     Telegraphic Agency, January 17, 2019, https://www.jta.org/2019/01/17/united-states/a-timeline-of-
     the-womens-march-anti-semitism-controversies.
512. Tamika Mallory, “[EXCLUSIVE] Tamika Mallory Speaks: ‘Wherever My People Are Is Where I Must
     Be,’ ” NewsOne, March 7, 2018, https://newsone.com/3779389/tamika-mallory-saviours-day/.
513. Ibid.
514. Gabe Friedman, “Tamika Mallory Fails to Condemn Farrakhan’s Anti-Semitism in Testy Exchange
     with Meghan McCain on ‘The View,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 14, 2019,
     https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/tamika-mallory-fails-to-condemn-farrakhans-anti-semitism-in-testy-
     exchange-with-meghan-mccain-on-the-view.
     27.
     Teresa
     Shook,
     status
     update,
     Facebook,
     November
     19,
     2018,
     https://www.facebook.com/TeresaShookOfficial/posts/2368957223146495.
515. “Women’s March Announces Appointment of 17 Prominent, Diverse Movement Leaders to National
     Board,” press release, Women’s March, September 16, 2019, https://womensmarch.com/press-
     releases/2019/9/16/womens-march-announces-appointment-of-17-prominent-diverse-movement-
     leaders-to-national-board.
516. Carmen Perez, “Where We Went Wrong: A Leader of the Women’s March Looks Back, and Forward,”
     New York Daily News, January 17, 2019, https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-where-we-
     went-wrong-20190117-story.html.
517. Farah Stockman, “One Year After Women’s March, More Activism but Less Unity,” New York Times,
     January 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/us/womens-march-anniversary.html.
518. Ibid.
519. Michael Wines, “Issues Abound at 4th Women’s March, ‘But It All Ties into Trump,’” New York
     Times, January 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/us/womens-march.html.
520. “Our Story,” Pussyhat Project, https://www.pussyhatproject.com/our-story.
521. Ibid.
522. Angela Peoples, “Don’t Just Thank Black Women. Follow Us.” New York Times, December 16, 2017,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/opinion/sunday/black-women-leadership.html.
523. Erin Pinkus and Mark Blumenthal, “SurveyMonkey Poll Profiles Women’s March Participants,”
     SurveyMonkey,
     https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/surveymonkey-poll-profiles-womens-
     march-participants/.
524. Emily Stewart, “Poll: More Americans Are Hitting the Streets to Protest in the Era of Trump,” Vox,
     April 7, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/7/17209710/trump-protest-poll.
525. Davina Sutton, “Erica Garner Will Not Stop Marching,” NBC News, March 30, 2015,
     https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/erica-garner-will-not-stop-marching-n327941.
526. Joshua Yeager and James Ward, “89-Year-Old Civil Rights Leader Dolores Huerta Arrested at
     California
     Labor
     Protest,”
     USA
     Today,
     August
     20,
     2019,
     https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/08/20/dolores-huerta-civil-rights-leader-
     arrested-fresno-labor-protest/2068197001/.
527. Leah Donnella, “The Standing Rock Resistance Is Unprecedented (It’s Also Centuries Old,” NPR,
     November 22, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/11/22/502068751/the-
     standing-rock-resistance-is-unprecedented-it-s-also-centuries-old.
528. “Air Force 1: Colin Kaepernick,” Nike, https://www.nike.com/launch/t/air-force-1-colin-kaepernick.
529. “Littlefeather Recounts Price of Native Activism,” CBC, August 6, 2010,
     https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/littlefeather-recounts-price-of-native-activism-1.948486.
530. Koa Beck, “Jill Soloway, Tarana Burke Weigh In on the New Time’s Up CEO,” Out, January 17, 2019,
     https://www.out.com/news-opinion/2019/1/17/jill-soloway-tarana-burke-weigh-new-times-ceo.
531. A research company that analyzes celebrity data.
532. Kerry Flynn, “Survey Shows Celebrities Sharing #MeToo Stories See Boost in Marketing Credibility,”
     Digiday, July 17, 2018, https://digiday.com/marketing/survey-shows-celebrities-sharing-metoo-stories-
     see-boost-marketing-credibility/.
533. Harron Walker, “Who Cares if Speaking Out on #MeToo Helps a Celebrity’s Brand?” Jezebel, July 17,
     2018, https://jezebel.com/who-cares-if-speaking-out-on-metoo-helps-a-celebritys-1827662405#!.
534. Flynn, “Survey Shows Celebrities Sharing #MeToo Stories.”
535. A data, content, and strategy studio.
536. Flynn, “Survey Shows Celebrities Sharing #MeToo Stories.”
537. Falk Rehkopf, “Why Brand Activism Wins over Brand Neutrality,” Ubermetrics, November 13, 2018,
     https://www.ubermetrics-technologies.com/why-brand-activism-wins-over-brand-neutrality/.
538. Ibid.
539. Erin Fuchs, “The #MeToo Movement Is a Boon for Big Law Firms,” Yahoo! Finance, August 1, 2018,
     https://finance.yahoo.com/news/metoo-movement-benefitting-big-law-firms-143619605.html.
540. Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “How the Finance Industry Is Trying to Cash In on

MeToo,”

New
York
Times,
January
28,
2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/business/metoo-finance-lawsuits-harassment.html.

54. Doug Criss, “The Media’s Version of #MeToo Is Unrecognizable to the Movement’s Founder, Tarana
    Burke,” CNN, November 30, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/us/tarana-burke-ted-talk-
    trnd/index.html.
55. Ibid.
56. Karen Grigsby Bates, “Race and Feminism: Women’s March Recalls the Touchy History,” NPR,
    January 21, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/01/21/510859909/race-and-
    feminism-womens-march-recalls-the-touchy-history.
57. Farah Stockman, “Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues About Race,” New
    York Times, January 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/us/womens-march-on-
    washington-opens-contentious-dialogues-about-race.html.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. womensmarch, Instagram post, December 28, 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BOkvckuDi1j/?
    utm_source=ig_embed.
    61.
    Women’s
    March,
    status
    update,
    Facebook,
    January
    2,
    2017,
    https://www.facebook.com/womensmarchonwash/posts/we-could-only-become-sisters-in-struggle-
    by-confronting-the-ways-women-through-s/1392539077426034/.
61. Ibid.; Stockman, “Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues.”
62. Women’s March, status update.
63. Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War
    South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 125.
64. Stockman, “Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues.”
65. Ibid.
66. Jamilah Lemieux, “Why I’m Skipping the Women’s March on Washington [Op-Ed],” Color Lines,
    January 17, 2017, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/why-im-skipping-womens-march-washington-
    op-ed.
67. Ibid.
68. Women’s March, status update.
69. Ibid.
70. Leila Schochet, “The Child Care Crisis Is Keeping Women Out of the Workforce,” Center for
    American
    Progress,
    March
    28,
    2019,
    https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-
    childhood/reports/2019/03/28/467488/child-care-crisis-keeping-women-workforce/.
71. Ibid.
72. Simon Workman and Steven Jessen-Howard, “Understanding the True Cost of Child Care for Infants
    and
    Toddlers,”
    Center
    for
    American
    Progress,
    November
    15,
    2018,
    https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-
    childhood/reports/2018/11/15/460970/understanding-true-cost-child-care-infants-toddlers/.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Schochet, “The Child Care Crisis.”
76. Ibid.
    Chapter Seventeen
77. Claudia Goldin, “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870
    and 1880,” Journal of Economic History 37, no. 1 (1977): 87–108.
78. Jennifer L. Berdahl and Celia Moore, “Workplace Harassment: Double Jeopardy for Minority
    Women,” Journal of Applied Psychology 91, no. 2 (2006): 426–36.
79. Rachel Thomas et al., Women in the Workplace (McKinsey & Company, 2019).
80. Ibid.
81. Zuhairah Washington and Laura Morgan Roberts, “Women of Color Get Less Support at Work.
    Here’s How Managers Can Change That.” Harvard Business Review, March 4, 2019,
    https://hbr.org/2019/03/women-of-color-get-less-support-at-work-heres-how-managers-can-change-
    that.
82. Ashleigh Shelby Rosette and Robert W. Livingston, “Failure Is Not a Option for Black Women:
    Effects of Organizational Performance on Leaders with Single versus Dual-Subordinate Identities,”
    Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 5 (September 2012): 1162–67.
83. Katherine W. Phillips, Tracy L. Dumas, and Nancy P. Rothbard, “Diversity and Authenticity,”
    Harvard Business Review, March–April 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/03/diversity-and-authenticity.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
87. Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, 146.
88. Alison Ives, “Allison Williams Is the Feminist We Need,” Refinery29, March 10, 2017,
    https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/allison-williams-keds-feminism-equality-meaning.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Thu-Huong Ha, “How Can We All ‘Have It All’? Anne-Marie Slaughter at TEDGlobal 2013,”
    TEDBlog, June 11, 2013, https://blog.ted.com/how-can-we-all-have-it-all-anne-marie-slaughter-at-
    tedglobal-2013/.
93. Lena Dunham, “Lena Dunham on Why Red Lipstick Is Feminism’s New Calling Card,” Vogue, June
    1, 2017, https://www.vogue.com/article/lena-dunham-essay-the-revolution-will-wear-red-lipstick-
    feminism-womens-movement.
94. Joan Entmacher, Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Julie Vogtman, and Lauren Frohlich, Insecure &
    Unequal: Poverty and Income among Women and Families 2000–2012 (National Women’s Law
    Center, 2013).
95. Heather D. Boonstra, “Abortion in the Lives of Women Struggling Financially: Why Insurance
    Coverage
    Matters,”
    Guttmacher
    Institute,
    July
    14,
    2016,
    https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2016/07/abortion-lives-women-struggling-financially-why-
    insurance-coverage-matters.
96. Rachel Simon, “Rachel Brosnahan Is Standing on the Shoulders of Giants,” Bustle, January 3, 2019,
    https://www.bustle.com/p/rachel-brosnahan-is-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants-13169941.
97. Leigh Weingus, “Rachel Brosnahan Urges Women to Use Their Voice and Vote in Emmy Acceptance
    Speech,” NBC News, September 18, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/know-your-
    value/feature/rachel-brosnahan-urges-women-use-their-voice-vote-emmy-acceptance-ncna910721.
98. Simon, “Rachel Brosnahan Is Standing on the Shoulders.”
99. Ibid.
100. Rachel Sherman, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
     2017), 65.
101. Sally Power, Annabelle Allouch, Phillip Brown, and Gerbrand Tholen, “Giving Something Back?
     Sentiments of Privilege and Social Responsibility among Elite Graduates from Berlin and France,”
     International Sociology 31, no. 3 (2016): 305–23.
     Chapter Eighteen
     1.
     “What
     Is
     Food
     Insecurity?”
     Feeding
     America,
     https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/understand-food-insecurity/.
102. Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Matthew P. Rabbitt, Christian A. Gregory, and Anita Singh, Household Food
     Security in the United States in 2018 (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture Economic
     Research Service, September 2019).
103. “The Links between Hunger and the Gender Gap,” Move for Hunger, August 1, 2018,
     https://moveforhunger.org/the-links-between-hunger-and-the-gender-gap.
104. Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz, and Tiffany Hsu, “ ‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus
     Spotlights
     Class
     Divide,”
     New
     York
     Times,
     March
     27,
     2020,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/business/economy/coronavirus-inequality.html.
105. Jeffery C. Mays and Andy Newman, “Virus Is Twice as Deadly for Black and Latino People Than
     Whites
     in
     N.Y.C.,”
     New
     York
     Times,
     April
     8,
     2020,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/coronavirus-race-deaths.html.
106. John Eligon, Audra D. S. Burch, Dionne Searcey, and Richard A. Oppel Jr., “Black Americans Face
     Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States,” New York Times, April 7, 2020,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/coronavirus-race.html.
107. Campbell Robertson and Robert Gebeloff, “How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential
     Workers
     in
     America,”
     New
     York
     Times,
     April
     18,
     2020,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/coronavirus-women-essential-workers.html.
108. Mays and Newman, “Virus Is Twice as Deadly for Black and Latino People.”
109. Peter J. Cunningham, “Why Even Healthy Low-Income People Have Greater Health Risks Than
     Higher-Income People,” To the Point, Commonwealth Fund, September 27, 2018,
     https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2018/healthy-low-income-people-greater-health-risks.
110. Michael Sainato, “The Americans Dying Because They Can’t Afford Medical Care,” Guardian,
     January 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-healthcare-medical-
     costs.
111. Isobel Asher Hamilton, “‘I Don’t Want to Be There, but I Need the Income’: Worried Amazon
     Workers Say the Company’s Sick-Leave Policy Is Failing to Protect Them,” Business Insider, April 10,
     2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-workers-coronavirus-policies-inadequate-2020-4.
112. Annie Palmer, “Amazon Warehouse Workers Plan Nationwide Protest This Week to Demand
     Coronavirus Protections,” CNBC, April 20, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/amazon-
     warehouse-workers-plan-national-coronavirus-protest.html.
113. Maegan Vazquez and Betsy Klein, “Trump Says More Than 2 Million Coronavirus Tests Have Been
     Done in the US, and Claims Mass Testing Not Needed,” CNN, April 9, 2020,
     https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/trump-coronavirus-tests/index.html.
114. Day One Staff, “Amazon’s COVID-19 Blog: Updates on How We’re Responding to the Crisis,” Day
     One (blog), September 22, 2020, https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to-
     help-employees-communities-and-customers-affected-by-covid-19.
115. David Yaffe-Bellany, “Labor Fight Collides with the Pandemic at Trader Joe’s,” New York Times, April
     2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/business/trader-joes-unionization-coronavirus.html.
116. Ibid.
117. Audrey Garces, “Another Whole Foods Employee in SF Tests Positive for Corona virus,” KQED, April
     9, 2020, https://www.kqed.org/news/11811589/another-whole-foods-employee-in-sf-tests-positive-
     for-coronavirus.
118. Ibid.
119. Bennett, “‘I Feel Like I Have Five Jobs.’”
120. Jennifer Medina and Lisa Lerer, “When Mom’s Zoom Meeting Is the One That Has to Wait,” New
     York Times, April 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/women-coronavirus-
     2020.html.
121. Ibid.
122. Brittni Frederiksen, Ivette Gomez, Alina Salganicoff, and Usha Ranji, “Coronavirus: A Look at
     Gender Differences in Awareness and Actions,” Kaiser Family Foundation, March 20, 2020,
     https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/coronavirus-a-look-at-gender-differences-in-
     awareness-and-actions/.
123. Sharon Begley, “Who Is Getting Sick, and How Sick? A Breakdown of Coronavirus Risk by
     Demographic Factors,” Stat, March 3, 2020, https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/03/who-is-getting-
     sick-and-how-sick-a-breakdown-of-coronavirus-risk-by-demographic-factors/.
124. Frederiksen, Gomez, Salganicoff, and Ranji, “Coronavirus: A Look at Gender Differences in
     Awareness and Actions.”
125. Miranda Bryant, “‘I Was Risking My Life’: Why One in Four US Women Return to Work Two Weeks
     after Childbirth,” Guardian, January 27, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-
     news/2020/jan/27/maternity-paid-leave-women-work-childbirth-us.
126. Samuel Stebbins and Thomas C. Frohlich, “The Poverty Rates for Every Group in the US: From Age
     and
     Sex
     to
     Citizenship
     Status,”
     USA
     Today,
     February
     28,
     2020,
     https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/11/06/united-states-poverty-rate-for-every-
     group/40546247/.
127. Richard Eisenberg, “Women and Retirement: Saving Less, Worrying More,” Forbes, December 14,
     2016,
     https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2016/12/14/women-and-retirement-saving-less-
     worrying-more/#6aabc815601d.
128. The L Word: Generation Q, season 1, episode 6.
129. Alice Park, “Can Anyone Save the Scandal-Plagued USA Gymnastics? Li Li Leung Is Determined to
     Try,” Time, June 17, 2019, https://time.com/5606251/li-li-leung-usa-gymnastics-interview/.
130. Dave Itzkoff, “Can ‘Captain Marvel’ Fix Marvel’s Woman Problem?” New York Times, February 28,
     2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/captain-marvel.html.
131. Ben Sisario, “Grammy Awards Name First Female President,” New York Times, May 8, 2019,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/business/media/grammy-awards-deborah-dugan.html.
132. Deloitte, “Deloitte LLP Elects First Female CEO of a Major U.S. Professional Services Firm, Cathy
     Engelbert; Mike Fucci Elected Chairman of the Board,” PR Newswire, February 9, 2015,
     https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-llp-elects-first-female-ceo-of-a-major-us-
     professional-services-firm-cathy-engelbert-mike-fucci-elected-chairman-of-the-board-300032635.html.
133. Althea Legaspi, “Grammys Name Deborah Dugan New Recording Academy President and CEO,”
     Rolling Stone, May 8, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grammys-deborah-
     dugan-new-recording-academy-president-ceo-833238/.
134. Jon Blistein, “New Study: Music Industry’s Greatest Gender Disparity Is Behind the Scenes,” Rolling
     Stone, January 25, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/new-study-music-
     industrys-greatest-gender-disparity-is-behind-the-scenes-203036/.
135. Kory Grow, “Recording Academy Counters Recent Study Showing Gender Disparity at Grammys,”
     Rolling Stone, February 16, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/recording-
     academy-counters-recent-study-showing-gender-disparity-at-grammys-205590/.
136. Jem Aswad, “Incoming Grammy Chief Promises to ‘Bring New Perspective’ to Embattled
     Organization,” Variety, May 8, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/music/news/incoming-grammy-
     recording-academy-chief-deborah-dugan-new-perspective-1203209423/.
137. Lisa Respers France, “Recording Academy Fires Deborah Dugan,” CNN, March 2, 2020,
     https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/entertainment/deborah-dugan-recording-academy-
     fired/index.html.
138. Lisa Respers France and Megan Thomas, “Former Grammys Head Deborah Dugan Sues Recording
     Academy,
     Alleges
     Sexual
     Harassment,”
     CNN,
     January
     22,
     2020,
     https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/22/entertainment/deborah-dugan-grammys
     -lawsuit-
     trnd/index.html.
139. France, “Recording Academy Fires Deborah Dugan.”
140. Audrey Carlsen, Maya Salam, Claire Cain Miller, Denise Lu, Ash Ngu, Jugal K. Patel, and Zach
     Wichter, “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are
     Women.”
     New
     York
     Times,
     October
     29,
     2018,
     https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-replacements.html.
141. Ibid.
142. D. G. McCullough, “Women CEOs: Why Companies in Crisis Hire Minorities—and Then Fire
     Them,”
     Guardian,
     August
     8,
     2014,
     https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-
     business/2014/aug/05/fortune-500-companies-crisis-woman-ceo-yahoo-xerox-jc-penny-economy.
143. Emily Stewart, “Why Struggling Companies Promote Women: The Glass Cliff, Explained,” Vox,
     October 31, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/10/31/17960156/what-is-the-glass-cliff-women-ceos.
144. McCullough, “Women CEOs”; Alison Cook and Christy Glass, “Above the Glass Ceiling: When Are
     Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Promoted to CEO?” Strategic Management Journal 35, no. 7
     (July 2014): 1080–89.
145. Stewart, “Why Struggling Companies Promote Women.”
146. Stephen J. Dubner, “Extra: Carol Bartz Full Interview (Ep. 327),” Freakonomics (podcast), March 25,
     2018, https://freakonomics.com/podcast/carol-bartz/.
147. Ibid.
148. Ibid.
149. Robert Hof, “Yahoo Fires CEO Carol Bartz—Here’s Why,” Forbes, September 6, 2011,
     https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/09/06/report-yahoo-cans-ceo-carol-bartz-heres-what-
     went-wrong/#549aa3f12e07.
150. James B. Stewart, “In the Undoing of a C.E.O., a Puzzle,” New York Times, May 18, 2012,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/business/the-undoing-of-scott-thompson-at-yahoo-common-
     sense.html.
151. Ibid.
152. Michael A. Fletcher, “GM Names Mary Barra as Car Industry’s First Woman CEO,” Washington Post,
     December 10, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/gm-names-mary-barra-as-
     car-industrys-first-woman-ceo/2013/12/10/7d7827e8-61b8-11e3-8beb-3f9a9942850f_story.html.
153. General Motors Diversity & Inclusion Report (General Motors, 2018).
154. Mallory Simon and Sara Sidner, “Inside the GM Plant Where Nooses and ‘Whites-Only’ Signs
     Hung,” CNN, January 17, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/us/gm-toledo-racism-
     lawsuit/index.html.
155. Ibid.
156. Chris Isidore, “PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi Is Stepping Down,” CNN, August 6, 2018,
     https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/06/news/companies/indra-nooyi-pepsico/index.html.
157. Alexander Smith, “Pepsi Pulls Controversial Kendall Jenner Ad after Outcry,” NBC News, April 5,
     2017,
     https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner-echoes-black-lives-matter-
     sparks-anger-n742811.
158. Pepsi, tweet, April 5, 2017, https://twitter.com/pepsi/status/849711408770158594.
159. Scott Stump, “Simone Biles Reacts to Report Saying USA Gymnastics Never Asked Her about Nassar
     Abuse,” Today, November 22, 2019, https://www.today.com/news/simone-biles-says-pain-real-after-
     report-about-nassar-abuse-t168094.
160. Juliet Macur, “Top U.S.O.C. Officials Failed to Act on Nassar Allegations, Report Says,” New York
     Times, December 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/sports/usoc-investigation-
     report.html?module=inline.
161. Liz Clarke, “Simone Biles Blasts USA Gymnastics: ‘You Had One Job… and You Couldn’t Protect
     Us,” Washington Post, August 7, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/simone-
     biles-lashes-out-at-usa-gymnastics-in-tearful-statement/2019/08/07/20037d80-b93a-11e9-b3b4-
     2bb69e8c4e39_story.html.
162. Ibid.
163. Tracy Clark-Flory, “Stoya Is ‘Over’ Talking about Feminist Porn,” Jezebel, June 18, 2018,
     https://jezebel.com/stoya-is-over-talking-about-feminist-porn-1826771529.
164. Ibid.
165. Zameena Mejia, “Meet the Family Whose Business Has Been the No. 1 Fortune 500 Company for 6
     Straight Years,” CNBC, May 23, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/walmart-is-the-no-1-
     fortune-500-company-for-the-6th-straight-year.html.
166. Eric Bachman, “Key Takeaways from the Proposed $14 Million Walmart Pregnancy Discrimination
     Settlement,” Forbes, October 28, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericbachman/2019/10/28/key-
     takeaways-from-the-proposed-14m-walmart-pregnancy-discrimination-settlement/.
167. Samantha Schmidt, “Judge Approves $14 Million Settlement in Walmart Pregnancy Discrimination
     Case,” Washington Post, April 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-
     va/2020/04/29/walmart-pregnant-workers-discrimination-settlement/.
168. Amanda Hess, “The Wing Is a Women’s Utopia. Unless You Work There.” New York Times, March
     17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/magazine/the-wing.html.
169. Ibid.
170. William J. Mann, “How Marlon Brando Made Hollywood Face Its Racism—at the Oscars,” Daily
     Beast, December 15, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-marlon-brando-made-hollywood-
     face-its-racism-at-the-oscars.
     Chapter Nineteen
171. “Covering Sexual Misconduct in the #MeToo Era: Are You Ready?” Craig Newmark Graduate School
     of Journalism, City University of New York, https://www.journalism.cuny.edu/events/covering-
     sexual-misconduct-metoo-era-ready/.
172. Meika Berland and Morgan Harwood, Workplace Justice: Equal Pay for Latinas (Washington, DC:
     National
     Women’s
     Law
     Center,
     October
     2018),
     https://nwlc.org/wp-
     content/uploads/2017/10/Equal-Pay-for-Latina-Women-2018-English.pdf.
173. Jasmine Tucker, Equal Pay for Native Women (Washington, DC: National Women’s Law Center,
     September
     2019),
     https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Native-Women-Equal-Pay-
     2019.pdf.
174. Senator Martin Heinrich, The Economic State of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United
     States
     (Washington,
     DC:
     Joint
     Economic
     Committee
     Democrats,
     2017),
     https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/29646f09-bf04-4f11-a12f-544b27a3a85f/aapi-fact-
     sheet-final.pdf.
175. Koa Beck, “Gretchen Carlson’s Lawyer Opens Up about Her Case, Sexual Harassment at Fox News,
     and Taking On the Most Powerful Man in Media,” Marie Claire, July 8, 2016,
     https://www.marieclaire.com/career-advice/a21467/gretchen-carlson-sexual-harassment-lawyer/.
176. Ibid.
177. Dylan Farrow, “An Open Letter from Dylan Farrow,” New York Times, February 1, 2014,
     https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/an-open-letter-from-dylan-farrow/.
178. Ibid.
179. Ibid.
180. Maggie Haberman and Amy Chozick, “Hillary Clinton Chose to Shield a Top Adviser Accused of
     Harassment
     in
     2008,”
     New
     York
     Times,
     January
     26,
     2018,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/us/politics/hillary-clinton-chose-to-shield-a-top-adviser-
     accused-of-harassment-in-2008.html.
181. Ibid.
182. David W. Chen, “WNYC Chief Pushed Growth at the Cost of Station’s Culture,” New York Times,
     December 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/nyregion/wnyc-chief-laura-walker-firing-
     hosts-misconduct.html.
183. David W. Chen, “Embattled Head of New York Public Radio to Step Down,” New York Times,
     December
     19,
     2018,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/nyregion/wnyc-laura-walker-
     resignation.html.
184. Chen, “WNYC Chief Pushed Growth.”
185. Ibid.
186. “CEO Laura Walker Responds to Allegations against John Hockenberry,” Brian Lehrer Show,
     WNYC, December 5, 2017, https://www.wnyc.org/story/laura-walker-responds/.
187. Chen, “WNYC Chief Pushed Growth.”
188. Chen, “Embattled Head of New York Public Radio.”
189. Chen, “WNYC Chief Pushed Growth.”
190. Nick Romano, “Scarlett Johansson Advocates for Planned Parenthood in Passionate Women’s March
     Speech,” Entertainment Weekly, January 23, 2017, https://ew.com/news/2017/01/21/womens-
     march-scarlett-johansson-speech/.
191. Gregg Kilday, “Cate Blanchett on Woody Allen Molestation Charge: ‘I Hope They Find Some
     Resolution
     and
     Peace,’”
     Hollywood
     Reporter,
     February
     2,
     2014,
     https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cate-blanchett-woody-allen-molestation-676383.
192. Joanna Robinson, “Cate Blanchett: Social Media Is ‘Not the Judge and Jury’ of Woody Allen,” Vanity
     Fair, March 22, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/cate-blanchett-woody-allen-
     dylan-farrow-allegations.
193. Ibid.
194. Wesley Lowery, Kimbriell Kelly, Ted Mellnik, and Steven Rich, “Where Killings Go Unsolved,”
     Washington
     Post,
     June
     6,
     2018,
     https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/investigations/where-murders-go-unsolved/?
     utm_term=.81f22367a77f.
195. Michael Males, San Francisco’s Disproportionate Arrest of African American Women Persists (San
     Francisco: Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, April 2015).
196. Megan T. Stevenson and Sandra G. Mayson, “The Scale of Misdemeanor Justice,” Boston University
     Law Review 98, no. 731 (2018): 731–77.
197. “Annual Stop-and-Frisk Numbers,” NYCLU, 2019, https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data.
198. “Race and the Death Penalty,” ACLU, 2020, https://www.aclu.org/other/race-and-death-penalty.
199. Barbara O’Brien and Catherine M. Grosso, “Report on Jury Selection Study,” Faculty Publications,
     Michigan
     State
     University
     College
     of
     Law,
     December
     15,
     2011,
     https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1330&context=facpubs.
200. Gilad Edelman, “Why Is It So Easy for Prosecutors to Strike Black Jurors?” New Yorker, June 5, 2015,
     https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-is-it-so-easy-for-prosecutors-to-strike-black-jurors.
     31.
     Alexandria
     Ocasio-Cortez,
     tweet,
     August
     14,
     2018,
     https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1029380694160470017?lang=en.
201. Anna North and Chavie Lieber, “The Big, Controversial Business of The Wing, Explained,” Vox,
     February 7, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/2/7/18207116/the-wing-soho-dc-coworking-
     feminism-gelman.
     Chapter Twenty
202. Violet Moya, “Sephora Never Valued Workers Like Me,” New York Times, April 18, 2020,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/opinion/sephora-layoffs-coronavirus.html?
     referringSource=articleShare.
203. Ibid.
204. Ibid.
205. Manu Raju, Clare Foran, Ted Barrett, and Kristin Wilson, “Senate Approves Historic $2 Trillion
     Stimulus Deal amid Growing Coronavirus Fears,” CNN, March 26, 2020,
     https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/politics/stimulus-senate-action-coronavirus/index.html.
206. Kelsey Snell, “What’s Inside the Senate’s $2 Trillion Coronavirus Aid Package,” NPR, March 26,
     2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/03/26/821457551/whats-inside-the-senate-s-2-trillion-coronavirus-
     aid-package.
207. Danielle Kurtzleben, “Small Business Emergency Relief Program Hits $349 Billion Cap in Less Than
     2
     Weeks,”
     NPR,
     April
     16,
     2020,
     https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
     updates/2020/04/16/835958069/small-business-emergency-relief-program-hits-349-billion-cap-in-
     less-than-2-week.
208. “Paycheck Protection Program,” US Small Business Administration, https://www.sba.gov/funding-
     programs/loans/coronavirus-relief-options/paycheck-protection-program.
209. Nora Esposito, Small Business Facts: Spotlight on Women-Owned Employer Businesses (Washington,
     DC: US Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy, March 2019).
210. Ibid.
211. “What the New Coronavirus Relief Bill Means for You,” NBC New York, March 19, 2020,
     https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/what-the-new-coronavirus-relief-bill-means-for-
     you/2334013/.
212. Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber, “F.A.Q. on Stimulus Checks, Unemployment and the
     Coronavirus
     Plan,”
     New
     York
     Times,
     September
     15,
     2020,
     https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-stimulus-package-questions-answers.html.
213. Adrianne M. Haney, “VERIFY: Are People Who Use the WIC Program Limited in What They Buy?”
     11 Alive, March 18, 2020, https://www.11alive.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/verify-are-
     people-who-use-wic-program-limited-in-what-they-buy/85-e62c62f5-f3b2-433f-b04d-b6ec4175f566.
214. “What the New Coronavirus Relief Bill Means for You.”
215. Scott Neuman, “Global Lockdowns Resulting in ‘Horrifying Surge’ in Domestic Violence, U.N.
     Warns,”
     NPR,
     April
     6,
     2020,
     https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
     updates/2020/04/06/827908402/global-lockdowns-resulting-in-horrifying-surge-in-domestic-
     violence-u-n-warns.
216. Lilly Fowler, “Undocumented Workers Fend for Themselves with Little COVID-19 Help,” Crosscut,
     April 14, 2020, https://crosscut.com/2020/04/undocumented-workers-fend-themselves-little-covid-
     19-help.
217. Tonya Pendleton, “Incarcerated Black Women Face Numerous Issues in COVID-19 Pandemic,” Grio,
     April 24, 2020, https://thegrio.com/2020/04/24/incarcerated-black-women-covid-19-pandemic/.
218. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Vanessa Swales, “Prisoner with Coronavirus Dies after Giving Birth
     while
     on
     Ventilator,”
     New
     York
     Times,
     April
     29,
     2020,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/us/coronavirus-inmate-death-andrea-circle-bear.html.
219. Jonathan Capehart, “Trump and Governors Can Slow the Spread of COVID-19 in Prisons and Jails,”
     Washington Post, April 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/trump-
     governors-can-slow-spread-covid-19-prisons-jails/.
220. Ibid.
221. Jon Queally, “‘Just Calm Down,’ Says Pelosi, When Asked if She Made Tactical Error in COVID-19
     Relief
     Fight
     with
     McConnell,”
     Common
     Dreams,
     April
     26,
     2020,
     https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/26/just-calm-down-says-pelosi-when-asked-if-she-
     made-tactical-error-covid-19-relief#.
222. Mike Lillis and Juliegrace Brufke, “House Passes $484B Coronavirus Relief Package,” Hill, April 23,
     2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/house/494401-house-passes-484b-coronavirus-relief-package.
223. Andrea Germanos, “AOC Takes Brave, Lonely Stand against ‘Unconscionable’ COVID-19 Relief
     Package That Doesn’t Sufficiently Help Those Hurt the Most,” Common Dreams, April 24, 2020,
     https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/24/aoc-takes-brave-lonely-stand-against-
     unconscionable-covid-19-relief-package-doesnt.
224. Chantal Da Silva, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Explains Why She Voted against Coronavirus Relief
     Package,” Newsweek, April 24, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-explains-
     why-she-voted-against-coronavirus-relief-package-1499998.
225. Ibid.
226. “Harris, Jayapal Announce Domestic Workers Bill of Rights,” press release, office of Senator Kamala
     D. Harris, July 15, 2019, https://www.harris.senate.gov/news/press-releases/harris-jayapal-announce-
     domestic-workers-bill-of-
     rights#targetText=The%20Domestic%20Workers%20Bill%20of%20Rights%20Act%20is%20the%20fir
     st,held%20problems%20within%20this%20sector.
227. Kamala Harris, Pramila Jayapal, and Ai-jen Poo, “Change Begins at Home—and on the Floor of
     Congress,” CNN, November 29, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/29/opinions/domestic-
     workers-bill-of-rights-harris-poo-jayapal/index.html.
228. Jerome Hunt, “A History of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” Center for American
     Progress,
     July
     19,
     2011,
     https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbtq-
     rights/news/2011/07/19/10006/a-history-of-the-employment-non-discrimination-act/.
229. Nina Totenberg, “Supreme Court Delivers Major Victory to LGBTQ Employees,” NPR, June 15,
     2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/863498848/supreme-court-delivers-major-victory-to-lgbtq-
     employees.
230. “Section 1557: Amicus Brief,” Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, September 2020,
     https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/press-releases/study-finds-lgbt-adults-experience-food-
     insecurity-and-snap-participation-at-higher-levels-than-non-lgbt-adults/.
231. “Guns and Violence against Women,” Everytown Research & Policy, October 17, 2019,
     https://everytownresearch.org/reports/guns-intimate-partner-violence/.
     Chapter Twenty-One
232. Matt Williams, “‘Legitimate Rape’ Rarely Leads to Pregnancy, Claims US Senate Candidate,”
     Guardian, August 19, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/19/republican-todd-
     akin-rape-pregnancy.
233. Daniel Cox, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, and Robert P. Jones, PhD, “Race, Religion, and Political
     Affiliation of Americans’ Core Social Networks,” Public Religion Research Institute, August 3, 2016,
     https://www.prri.org/research/poll-race-religion-politics-americans-social-networks/.
234. Ibid.
235. Sarah Mervosh, “How Much Wealthier Are White School Districts Than Nonwhite Ones? $23
     Billion,
     Report
     Says,”
     New
     York
     Times,
     February
     27,
     2019,
     https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/education/school-districts-funding-white-minorities.html.
236. Juliana Menasce Horowitz, “Americans See Advantages and Challenges in Country’s Growing Racial
     and
     Ethnic
     Diversity,”
     Pew
     Research
     Center,
     May
     8,
     2019,
     https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/05/08/americans-see-advantages-and-challenges-in-countrys-
     growing-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/.
237. Spencer Kornhaber, “The Emmys Speech of the Night,” Atlantic, September 20, 2015,
     https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/harriet-tubman-at-the-emmys-viola-davis-first-black-
     woman/406360/.
     Index
     A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition.
     Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that
     page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading
     system’s search function.
     A
     abortion, 60, 62, 197
     Access Hollywood, 173
     activism and protests, 177–81
     Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 4
     advertising, 106–8, 111, 129
     Affordable Care Act, xx
     AfterEllen.com, 14, 128–29
     Agrawal, Miki, 144–45, 148, 151–57, 159, 225
     Ahmed, Sara, 1, 23
     Ailes, Roger, 222
     Akin, Todd, 237
     Alba, Jessica, 103
     Albarrán, Tammy, 158
     Allen, Woody, 222–23, 226, 227
     Amanpour, Christiane, 227
     Amazon, 202–3
     Americans with Disabilities Act, 54
     Amoruso, Sophia, 112, 145–48, 150
     Anthony, Susan B., 6, 26, 39
     Are All the Women Still White? (Gan), 95–96
     B
     Bad Feminist (Gay), 5
     Banatte, Kevin, 177
     Bankhead, Tallulah, 48
     Barbanel, Howard, 201–2
     Barra, Mary, 215
     Barrymore, Drew, 111
     Barrymore, Ethel, 9, 10, 12
     Bartz, Carol, 213–14
     Beal, Frances, 67
     Bear, Andrea Circle, 232–33
     Beauvoir, Simone de, 13
     Bell, Arthur, 94
     Bell Jar, The (Plath), 60
     Bendix, Trish, 129
     Berg, Barbara, 4–5
     Berks, Rachel, 92, 93
     Beyoncé, 4–5, 9, 37, 103
     Biles, Simone, 216–17
     Billboard, 3, 4
     Black Lives Matter, 178, 187, 215
     Black Panthers, 53, 54
     Blakely, Sara, 105
     Blanchett, Cate, 223, 226–29
     Bland, Bob, 173–75
     Blatch, Harriot Eaton Stanton, 78
     Boissevain, Eugen Jan, 61
     Braden, Anne McCarty, 47–48, 50, 51, 169, 186
     branding, 103–15, 141, 143, 147, 175–77, 179, 181, 182
     Brando, Marlon, 181
     Brosnahan, Rachel, 198
     Brown, Tina, 9, 106
     Burch, Tory, 83, 164
     Burke, Tarana, 182, 183, 222
     Burns, Lucy, 7
     Burst of Light, A (Lorde), 61
     Business Insider, 145, 154
     Bustle, 147–48, 197–98
     Butler, Judith, 13
     Buzzfeed, 127–29
     C
     Califano, Joseph, Jr., 52, 54
     Cannon, Clarence, 43
     capitalism, 67, 115, 117–25, 128, 129, 142, 143, 162
     Cappello, Dean, 225–26
     CARES Act, 232, 233
     Carlson, Gretchen, 222
     Carter, Jimmy, 51
     Chan-Malik, Sylvia, 131
     Chaplin, Charlie, 10
     Chen, Eva, 163
     Chicago Daily Tribune, 27
     Chicana Lesbians (Trujillo), 87
     Child, Lydia Maria, 108
     children, having, 67–69
     childcare, 82, 189–92
     maternity leave, 81–82, 150–51, 189, 191–92, 236
     Chisholm, Shirley, 30
     Civil Rights Act, 80
     civil rights movement, 29, 53, 66, 79–80, 95, 178
     Clarke, Cheryl, 85–87
     Clark-Flory, Tracy, 217
     Clarkson, Kelly, 3
     Clinton, Hillary, 35, 36, 91, 173, 177, 224–26
     Colburn, Marlene, 130, 131
     Coles, Joanna, 105
     collective, 39–54, 62
     CollectorsWeekly.com, 37
     Colorlines.com, 187
     Comenos, Janet, 181
     Committee for Action Against the High Cost of Living, 42
     Common Sense and a Little Fire (Orleck), 29, 75–76, 119–21
     Concepcion, Aimee, 150–51
     Cone, Kitty, 51–54
     Cosmopolitan, 104–6, 113–14, 165, 194
     COVID-19 pandemic, xix, xx, 201–5, 231–34
     Cowan, Liza, 92
     criminal justice system, 227–29, 236
     Crisis, 28
     Cuba, 16–19
     Cuomo, Andrew, 202
     Cut, The, 144, 148, 162–64, 197
     D
     Daily Beast, 3, 115
     Dakota Access Pipeline and Standing Rock protests, 35–37, 179
     Davis, Angela, 73, 75, 118–19, 181, 218
     Davis, Martha F., 30
     Davis, Viola, 238
     Deerinwater, Jen, 34–36
     Delevingne, Cara, 91, 92
     Deloitte, 206–7
     Depression, Great, 17, 41, 42, 44
     Diary of a Mad Housewife, 60
     Didion, Joan, 59
     Dietrich, Marlene, 63
     Digiday, 181, 182
     disability rights movement, 51–54, 99, 183
     Dobkin, Alix, 92
     Doctor, Ken, 107
     Dolan, Merrillee, 30–31
     domestic workers, 55–57, 65–76, 235–36
     Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, 55–57, 235–36
     Domínquez Navarro, Ofelia, 17–19
     Dream of a Common Language, The (Rich), 60–61
     Duberman, Martin, 94–95
     Du Bois, W. E. B., 28
     Dugan, Deborah, 206, 211–12
     Dunham, Lena, 147, 197
     Dyke March, 129–31
     E
     Eastman, Crystal, 7
     economics, 65–66, 70, 72, 81
     elder abuse, 70–71
     Election, 4
     Elle.com, 138–39
     Ellevate Network, 37, 112
     Engelbert, Cathy, 207
     Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 30
     Equal Rights Amendment, 28, 30, 121
     Eskridge, William N., Jr., 63
     EverydayFeminism.com, 37
     F
     Farmer, Ashley, 184
     Farrakhan, Louis, 174–75
     Farrell, Amy Erdman, 88–90
     Farrow, Dylan, 222–23, 227
     fat activism, 88–90
     Fat-Bottom Revue, 90
     Fat Shame (Farrell), 88–90
     Fear of Flying (Jong), 59, 60
     Feinberg, Leslie, 95
     Female Eunuch, The (Greer), 59
     Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 7, 172, 197
     Feminism for the Americas (Marino), 15–18, 20–22
     Feministing, 4, 103
     Finnegan, Margaret, 101, 142
     Fitzgerald, Frank, 42
     Fitzgerald, Zelda, 48
     504 Sit-In, 51–54
     Forbes, 147
     Fortune, 106, 149
     Fortune 500 companies, 115, 141, 213, 215, 217
     Fourier, Charles, xviii
     Fowler, Susan, 157
     Fraser, Nancy, 81
     Friedan, Betty, 30, 31, 114
     The Feminine Mystique, 7, 172, 197
     Frist, Bill, 149
     Fun Fearless Life conference, 104–6
     “future is female,” 91–93
     G
     Gan, Jessie, 95–96
     GAP, 133–34
     garment workers, 78, 79, 119, 133–34
     Garner, Eric, 178
     Garner, Erica, 178
     Gay, Roxane, 5
     Gaylaw (Eskridge), 63
     Gelman, Audrey, 9, 229
     gender, 91–99, 122
     transgender, xv, 12–14, 93–99, 236
     General Motors, 215
     George-Parkin, Hilary, 151
     Gilmore Girls, 194–95

GIRLBOSS (Amoruso), 145–48

Glamour, xvi–xvii, 106, 111
Global Labor Justice, 133–34
Goldberg, Michelle, 115
Goldman, Emma, 165
Goldstein, Katherine, 166–67
González, Clara, 15–17, 21–22, 24
Google, 166
Great Depression, 17, 41, 42, 44
Greer, Germaine, 59
Gruening, Martha, 26
Guardian, 32, 36, 133, 147, 213
Guey, Lynne, 109
Gulden, Bjørn, 93
gun control, 236
H
Hall, Amelia, 182
H&M, 133–34
Harris, Holly, 233
Harvard Business Review, 147, 194
Harvard Kennedy School, 22–23
Havana Conference, 16
Having Your Say Convention, 56
Hayden, Casey, 66
health issues, 202
COVID-19 pandemic, xix, xx, 201–5
elderly women and, 71
see also reproductive issues
HelloFlo, 103
Hernandez, Aileen, 29
Herrera, Cristina, 87
Hess, Amanda, 218
heterosexism, 85–90
Heumann, Judy, 52–54
HEW (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare), 52, 54
High Country News, 31
Hockenberry, John, 213
Holder, Eric, 158
Holmes, Elizabeth, 138–40, 148–49
Hong, Sandra, 108–9
hooks, bell, 13, 124, 185
Howard University, 26
How We Get Free (Taylor), 117
Huber, Candice, 186–87
Huerta, Dolores, 45, 178–79
Huffington, Ariana, 106, 157–59
Huffington Post, 83
hunger, 201, 236
I
Immigrant Rights Law Clinic, 56
Inc.com, 150
Instagram, 140–41, 163, 177–80
Integrating the Sixties (Davis), 30
Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW), 16–21, 24
International Alliance of Women, 20
International Council of Women, 20
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 78, 119
International Women’s Day, 143, 196
J
Jadushlever, Renee, 13
Janmohamed, Shelina, 132
Jayapal, Pramila, 233
Jenner, Kendall, 215
Jezebel, 4, 150, 181, 217
Johansson, Scarlett, 223, 226
Jones, Denisha, 178
Jong, Erica, 59, 60, 77
Journal of Economic History, 193
justice system, 227–29, 236
K
Kaepernick, Colin, 181
Kaling, Mindy, 111
Kassan, Lauren, 9, 229
Katebi, Hoda, 133, 134
Kelly, Megyn, 173
Killers of a Dream (Smith), 50
King, Billie Jean, 60
King, Mary, 66
Kissinger, Henry, 148–49
Kovacevich, Richard, 149
Kovacoglu, Emrah, 129
Krawcheck, Sallie, 112
Kumar, Rashmee, 131
L
Labyris Books, 92
Latin America, 15–24
Lean In (Sandberg), 81, 82, 103–5, 113–15, 124, 138, 140, 147, 166–67, 171
leaning in and leaning on, 74, 77–83
Leibow, Chelsea, 153–54
Lemieux, Jamilah, 187, 188
Lemlich, Clara, 78
lesbians, 85–90, 92–94, 96, 127–31
Lessing, Doris, 61
Leung, Li Li, 206, 216
Limbaugh, Rush, 4
Lintz, Howard, 70–71
Littlefeather, Sacheen, 181, 218
Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed), 1, 23
Logan, Adella Hunt, 27
Lorde, Audre, 61, 141–42
Lucchesi, Annita, 32
Luisi, Paulina, 18
Lurie, Saba, 204
L Word, The: Generation Q, 205–6
Lyons, Jenna, 9
M
Ma, Remy, 9
MacAllister, Heather, 90
Machado y Morales, Gerardo, 17–19
Macy’s, 11
Malik, Nesrine, 133
Mallory, Tamika D., 173–75
Malone, Noreen, 148
Man Repeller, 9
Marçal, Katrine, 65–66, 69–70, 72, 81, 195
March On, 176
Marie Claire, xv, 93, 111, 177
Marino, Katherine M., 15–18, 20–22
Marvel Entertainment, 206
Maxim, 3
Mayer, Marissa, 3, 138
McCartney, Kathleen, 98–99
McConnell, Mitch, 232
McDonald’s, 166
meat boycott, 40–46, 180
Medine, Leandra, 9
Medium, 155
Memoir of a Race Traitor (Segrest), 51
Merlan, Anna, 150

MeToo, xix, 24, 44, 181–83, 212, 213, 221–24, 226–28, 235

Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, 14
Milholland, Inez, 25
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 61
Miller, Frieda, 75
Mills College, 12–15, 98, 99, 110
Minaj, Nicki, xii–xiii
MMIWG (missing and murdered Indigenous women), 31–34, 47, 97
Montgomery Advertiser, 49
Morgan, Juliette Hampton, 48–51
Morning Telegraph, 10
Moss, Margaret, 34
Mott, Lucretia, xviii
Moya, Violet, 231–33
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 29–30
Ms., 59–60, 62, 121–23
MTV Video Music Awards, 4–5
Muslim women, 123, 131–34
N
NAACP, 28, 53
Nagle, Rebecca, 38
Narratively.com, 43
Nassar, Larry, 216
Nasty Gal, 145, 150–51
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 5–7, 11, 25–28
National Association of Colored Women, 27
National Domestic Workers Alliance, 56, 73, 5
National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, 31–32
National Institute of Justice (NIJ), 31
National Organization for Women (NOW), 29–31, 35–36
National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), 30
National Woman’s Party (NWP), 16, 21, 22, 28–29
National Women’s History Museum, 28
Nation of Islam Saviours’ Day, 174–75
Native and Indigenous people, 181
Standing Rock protests, 35–37, 179
women, 31–38, 96–97, 123
Negro Family, The (Moynihan), 29–30
New Women Space, 108–9
New York, 59, 147, 153, 162
New Yorker, 148
New York Public Radio, 225–26
New York Times, xv, xix, 41, 44, 45, 59, 60, 92, 93, 99, 106–7, 147, 164, 178, 183, 184, 186–87, 203, 204,
206, 213, 214, 222, 225, 227
New York Times Magazine, 218
New York Women’s Trade Union League (NYWTUL), 55, 75, 78, 79
Nooyi, Indra, 215
Nunn, Sam, 149
O
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 229, 233
older women, 70–71
O’Leary, Jean, 93–94, 96
O’Neal, Sarah, 99
Organization of American Studies, 19
Orleck, Annelise, 29, 44, 75–76, 119–21
O’Toole, Corbett Joan, 53–54
Out, 181
P
Padded Lilies, 90
Paley, Grace, 60
Panama Canal, 15
Pankhurst, Emmeline, 6
Pankhurst, Christabel, 6
Park, Maud Wood, 11
Patterson, Pat, 186
Paul, Alice, 5–7, 25–29, 114, 171, 172
Paul, Tacie, 6–7
Pelosi, Nancy, 233
Peoples, Angela, 176
Pepsi, 215
Perez, Carmen, 173, 175
Perry, Katy, 3
Perry, William J., 149
Pew Research Center, 132
Pickford, Mary, 9–10, 12
Plath, Sylvia, 60
Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 60
Politico, 166
Politics of the Pantry (Twarog), 46
Poo, Ai-jen, 55–57, 73–74
privilege, 161–67, 183, 196–97, 199–200
protests and activism, 177–81
Q
Quartz, 82, 109
R
Racialicious, 4
Racked, 151
Rakowski, Kelly, 92
Reagan, Ronald, 46
Recording Academy, 206, 211–12
Refinery29.com, 196–98
Rehabilitation Act, 51
Rehkopf, Falk, 182
reproductive issues, 71
abortion, 60, 62, 197
see also children, having
Rice, Florence, 45
Rich, Adrienne, 60–61
Rihanna, 93
Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, The (Rottenberg), 105
Rivera, Sylvia, 93–96
Roe v. Wade, 60, 80
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 50, 78
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 42, 43, 50, 78
Rose, ShiShi, 185
Roth, Benita, 67
Rottenberg, Catherine, 105
S
Saavedra, Yvette J., 87–88
St. Vincent, 91, 92
Salon, 37
Sandberg, Sheryl, 68, 145
Lean In, 81, 82, 103–5, 113–15, 124, 138, 140, 147, 166–67, 171
Sankar, Carol, 164
Sarsour, Linda, 173–75
Schneiderman, Rose, 78, 120, 204
Segrest, Mab, 51
self, self-empowerment, 59–63, 65, 67, 83, 106
Selling Suffrage (Finnegan), 101
Seneca Falls Convention, xviii–xix
Separate Roads to Feminism (Roth), 67
Sephora, 231–32
Sexism in America (Berg), 4
sexual harassment and abuse, 221–29
see also #MeToo
Seymour, Lesley Jane, 106
Shaw, Anna Howard, 26
Sheffield, Shirley, 90
Sherman, Rachel, 199
Shook, Teresa, 173, 175
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 112, 197
slavery, 117–19, 123
Smith, Adam, 65
Smith, Barbara, 85
Smith, Lillian Eugenia, 50
Smith, Nancy Erika, 222
Smith College, 97–99
Snelling, Paula, 50
Sochi, Eileen, 99
social media, 179–80, 218–19
Instagram, 140–41, 163, 177–80
Social Security, 55, 78–79
Sontag, Susan, 60
Southern Regional Council, 50
Spotted, 181
Standing Rock, 35–37, 179
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, xviii, 6, 26, 39, 78, 114, 172
Steinem, Gloria, 45, 59, 60, 177
Sterling, Debbie, 103
Stevens, Doris, 16–22, 24, 28, 34, 172
Stone, Lucy, 6
Stonewall Riots, 94–96, 131
Stoya, 217
Strange Fruit (Smith), 50
Strapagiel, Lauren, 127–29
suffragettes, 5–7, 9–12, 15, 18–19, 25–29, 78, 108, 114, 120, 121, 142, 165, 171, 172, 228
Suh, Krista, 176
Supreme Court, 80, 236
Roe v. Wade, 60, 80
Swift, Taylor, 3, 103
T
Tablet.com, 40, 41
Tapper, Jake, 233
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 117
Teigen, Chrissy, 83
Telegraph, 37
Telfer, Tori, 147–48
10 Things I Hate About You, 4
Terrell, Mary Church, 27
TheAtlantic.com, 46
Theranos, 138–39, 148–49
Thinx, 144–45, 148, 151–57, 225
Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), 67
This Bridge Called My Back (Clarke), 85–87
This Land, 38
Thompson, Scott, 214
Time, 3, 4–5, 45, 73, 206
Tong, Rosemarie, 70–71
Trader Joe’s, 203
transgender people, xv, 12–14, 93–99, 127, 128, 236
Triangle Shirtwaist fire, 78, 119, 120, 204
Tribe, The, 109
Trujillo, Carla, 87
Trump, Donald, 34–36, 104, 173–74, 176–78, 184, 187
Tubman, Harriet, 238–40
Tucson.com, 33
Turner, Brock, 35
Tuscaloosa News, 49
Twarog, Emily E. LB., 46
U
Uber, 157–59
Ultraviolet, 35–36
Uneasy Street (Sherman), 199
Unfinished Business (Slaughter), 112
United Artists Corporation, 10
United Nations, 143, 147, 232
Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI), 32
USA Gymnastics, 206, 216
“Uses of the Erotic” (Lorde), 141–42
V
Valenti, Jessica, 5, 103
Valenzuela, Candace, 204
Variety, 83, 211
Vega, Tanzina, 213
Vergara, Sofía, 143
Violence Against Women Act, 31
Vogel, Lisa, 14
visibility, 193–200
Vox, 37, 153, 213, 229
W
Walker, Alice, 122–23
Walker, Harron, 181
Walker, Laura, 225, 226
Wallace, Henry, 42–43
Wall Street Journal, 138
Walmart, 217
Wann, Marilyn, 88–90
Warn, Sarah, 129
Washington, Kerry, 83
Washington, Mary Helen, 123
Washington Post, 109, 139–40, 173, 174, 217, 233
Wayne, John, 218
Wells, Ida B., 27, 28, 166
Whelan, Melanie, 162–64
Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? (Marçal), 65–66, 69–70, 72, 81, 195
Whole Foods, 203–4
Willey, Sarah Joyce, 204
Williams, Allison, 196–98
Willis, Ellen, 121–22
Willis, Jennifer, 184–85
Wilson, Woodrow, 7, 165
Wing, The, 9, 12, 15, 104, 108–10, 166, 218, 229
Wojcicki, Susan, 82
Wolf, Naomi, 59
Woman Suffrage Procession, 25–28
Women, Race & Class (Davis), 73, 118–19
Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, 147
Women’s Journal, 25–26, 108
Women’s March, 173–77, 183–88, 226
Wong, Calliope, 97–98
Wong, Melissa, 108–9
work, workers, 69, 119–21, 166–67
business, wealth, and the corporate world, 103–15, 135–59, 162–67
childcare and, 82, 189–92
COVID-19 pandemic and, xx, 201–5, 231–33
domestic workers, 55–57, 65–76, 235–36
fighting the systems, 201–19
garment workers, 78, 79, 119, 133–34
labor laws, 55–57, 79
leaning in and leaning on, 74, 77–83
in Muslim-majority countries, 133–34
Social Security, 55, 78–79
unions, 75, 79, 119
visibility and, 193–200
wage gap, 138
working outside the home, 71–72
Y
Yahoo!, 3, 138, 182–83, 213, 214
Z
Zuk, Mary, 42–44, 46
Zweiman, Jayna, 176
An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Copyright © 2021 by Koa Beck
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Author photograph © Martha Stewart
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beck, Koa, author.
Title: White feminism : from the suffragettes to influencers and who they leave behind / Koa Beck.
Description: New York : Atria Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031312 | ISBN 9781982134419 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982134426 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781982134433 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism—Social aspects. | Women, White. | Minority women. | Race relations.
Classification: LCC HQ1233 .B423 2021 | DDC 305.42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031312
ISBN 978-1-9821-3441-9
ISBN 978-1-9821-3443-3 (ebook)
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