Trumped and Abandoned

The invective of Trump supporters inspires Susan Faludi to take a look back at the “Angry White Men” of the 1990s who felt disenfranchised, and threatened by women like First Lady Hillary Clinton—men like Mike McNulty, a Second Amendment activist and documentarian whom Faludi interviewed twenty years ago.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Dec 7, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,456 words)

Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not

Susan Faludi’s takedown of “Lean In,” and a brief history of feminism and its relationship with capitalism: “In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object”:

“In 1834, America’s first industrial wage earners, the ‘mill girls’ of Lowell, Massachusetts, embarked on their own campaign for women’s advancement in the workplace. They didn’t ‘lean in,’ though. When their male overseers in the nation’s first large-scale planned industrial city cut their already paltry wages by 15 to 20 percent, the textile workers declared a ‘turn-out,’ one of the nation’s earliest industrial strikes. That first effort failed, but its participants did not concede defeat. The Lowell women would stage another turn-out two years later, create the first union of working women in American history, lead a fight for the ten-hour work day, and conceive of an increasingly radical vision that took aim both at corporate power and the patriarchal oppression of women. Their bruising early encounter with American industry fueled a nascent feminist outlook that would ultimately find full expression in the first wave of the American women’s movement.”

Source: The Baffler
Published: Oct 17, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,021 words)

Death of a Revolutionary

The life and death of pioneering feminist Shulamith Firestone:

“Midway through the service, the feminist author Kate Millett, now seventy-eight, approached the dais, bearing a copy of ‘Airless Spaces’ (1998), the only book that Firestone published after her landmark manifesto, ‘The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,’ which came out in 1970. Millett read from a chapter entitled ‘Emotional Paralysis,’ in which Firestone wrote of herself in the third person:

She could not read. She could not write. . . . She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.

“Clearly, something terrible had happened to Firestone, but it was not her despair alone that led Millett to choose this passage. When she finished reading, she said, ‘I think we should remember Shulie, because we are in the same place now.’ It was hard to say which moment the mourners were there to mark: the passing of Firestone or that of a whole generation of feminists who had been unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 8, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,097 words)