Good and Mad - How Women's Anger is Reshaping America

Zusatztext 77336532 Informationen zum Autor Rebecca Traister Klappentext "In the year 2018, it seems as if women's anger has suddenly erupted into the public conversation. But long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women's March, and before the #MeToo movement, women's anger was not only politically catalytic--but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates the long history of bitter resentment that has enshrouded women's slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men"--Good and Mad CHAPTER ONE SLEEPING GIANT The contemporary reemergence of women’s rage as a mass impulse comes after decades of feminist deep freeze. The years following the great social movements of the twentieth century—the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement—were shaped by deeply reactionary politics. When Phyllis Schlafly led an antifeminist crusade to stop the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment—the twenty-four-word constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed equal rights regardless of gender—finally succeeding in 1982, it was a sign that the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, and the righteous fury that had ignited it, had been sidelined. More broadly, the Reagan era, in which increasingly hard-right reactionary politics had joined with a religious “moral majority,” gave rise to a cultural backlash to all sorts of social progress. Under sharp attack were the benefits, rights, and protections that afforded poor women any stability, as well as the parts of the women’s movement that had produced legal, professional, and educational gains for middle-class women, better enabling them to live independently, outside of marriage, the patriarchal institution that had historically contained them and on which they had long depended. The right wing of the 1980s was driven to restrict abortion access and deregulate Wall Street while simultaneously destroying the social safety net, which Ronald Reagan had made sure was embodied by the specter of the black welfare queen. A 1986 Newsweek cover story, meanwhile, blared the news that a single woman at forty was more likely to get killed by a terrorist than get married. That later-debunked study was a key point of Susan Faludi’s chronicle of the era, Backlash, in which she tracked the varied, suffocating ways in which women’s anger was muffled throughout the Reagan years: how feminist activism was blamed for the purported “man shortage”; the day-care that enabled women to work outside the home vilified as dangerous for children. Popular culture showed liberated white career women as oversexed monsters, as in Fatal Attraction, or as cold, shoulder-padded harpies who had to be saved via hetero-union or punished via romantic rejection (see Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl). There was far too little space afforded to black heroines, and even some of the most nuanced were often crafted to serve male creators’ investments in how women’s liberation might serve their messages: Spike Lee’s view of the sexually voracious Nola Darling in the 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It and Bill Cosby’s Clair Huxtable, the successful matriarch who, given the context of Cosby’s own racial politics, served as a repudiation of black women who were not wealthy hetero-married mothers with law degrees. Who wanted to be a feminist? No one. And the anxiety about the term wasn’t about any of the good reasons to be skeptical of feminism—like the movement’s racial exclusions and elisions—but because the term itself, the idea of public and politicized challenge ...

Product details

• Authors: Rebecca Traister
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2018
• EAN: 9781501181795
• ISBN: 978-1-5011-8179-5
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 237 mm x 30 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories