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Have you ever relied on the kindness of strangers? What brings people together to find hope and solidarity? What do we owe each other as citizens and comrades?
Questions of care, intimacy, education, meaningful work, and social engagement lie at the core of our ability to understand the world and its possibilities for human flourishing. In Lean On Me feminist thinker Lynne Segal goes in search of hope in her own life and in the world around her. She finds it entwined in our intimate commitments to each other and our shared collective endeavours.
Segal calls this shared dependence 'radical care'. In recounting from her own life the moments of motherhood, and of being on the front line of second-wave feminism, she draws upon lessons from more than half a century of engagement in left feminist politics, with its underlying commitment to building a more egalitarian and nurturing world. The personal and the political combine in this rallying cry to transform radically how we approach education, motherhood, and our everyday vulnerabilities of disability, ageing, and enhanced needs.
Only by confronting head-on these different forms of interdependence and care can we change the way we think about the environment and learn to struggle - together -against impending climate catastrophe.
List of contents
Introduction: The Kindness of Strangers
1. Call That a Mother?
2. Valuing Education
3. A Feminist Life
4. Admitting Vulnerability
5. Repairing the Planet
6. Caring Futures
About the author
Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. Her books include Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men; and Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. She co-wrote Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright.
Report
Lean on Me contains crucial lessons, from one of the most important figures of the British Women's Liberation Movement, for our contemporary politics. Our dependence on the care of others, Lynne Segal reminds us, is not just an inescapable requirement of human life, but moreover the ultimate source of its meaning. Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex
