Historian Estelle Freedman has her own catchy diagnosis for headline-craving media types who, from time to time, have tried to proclaim that the revolution is over: False Feminist Death Syndrome.
“Based on the vibrant scholarship surveyed here, I find that the prospects for women have never been brighter,” she writes in her latest book. “We have much reason to hope that there will be no turning back from a feminist future.”
Freedman draws on more than 25 years of teaching for the sweeping new synthesis she presents in No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (Ballantine Books, 2002). Since founding Stanford’s program in feminist studies in 1980, she has taught the core introductory course every other year. Enrollment is as high as ever—85 this year—with men, now as then, making up 12 percent to 20 percent of the class.
A peripatetic scholar, Freedman tells readers that half the material in the book is drawn from her lecture notes, and the other half comes from issues she’s only recently begun to investigate herself. As she traces the roots of today’s many-hued feminisms, from ancient Egyptian queens and pre-Islamic Bedouins through 18th-century utopian socialists to third-wave daughters of the 1990s, Freedman sketches a broad global survey and then colors in the distinctive details, country by country. We hear Christine de Pizan—a 15th-century Italian writer whose work is studied in freshman Introduction to the Humanities courses—argue that God created men and women with equal potential, and we read about the “remarkable generation” of women in France, Germany, Britain and the United States who launched feminist journals in the mid-19th century.
Freedman is careful to balance her examination of Western feminisms that have the support of market economies and democratic systems with emerging movements in developing countries, where women have had to overcome the legacies of colonialism and barriers to land ownership. She weighs the global gains and losses with statistics like these:
• During the 1990s, 90 percent of the world’s nations elected women to national office.
• In 1995, the United Nations estimated the worldwide annual worth of women’s unpaid or underpaid work at $11 trillion.
• Each day, 1,500 women die in childbirth.
• Each year, 2 million girls undergo genital mutilation.
• Abortions are illegal in 127 countries.
• In the developing world, 90 percent of women borrowers repay their loans.
• In 1997, white men held 70 percent of full-time tenured faculty positions in the United States.
Pop singer Tracy Chapman, Zulu proverbs, China’s Rural Women Knowing All loan program and Wisconsin’s Welfare Warriors are just a few of the sources Freedman taps as she constructs an eminently readable and accessible overview of feminisms. Third-wave readers will enjoy the winks at soccer player Brandi Chastain and the punk rockers Bikini Kill, and their parents will appreciate Freedman’s take on Betty Friedan, Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir. In fact, Freedman looks at a number of personal stories, including that of the flight attendant who fought for better medical benefits and went on to become president of the National Organization for Women—Patricia Ireland. Freedman dips into diaries and poems and her favorite factory girls’ songs, which she loves to sing, accompanying herself on guitar, during Stanford’s annual Herstory Week.
There also are nods to Stanford alums, including the Law School graduate who couldn’t find a firm that would hire her in the 1950s and who went on to become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, JD ’52. And Freedman includes the contributions of her colleagues on campus, such as law professor Barbara Babcock, feminist economist Myra Strober, political theorist Susan Okin, Chicana writer Cherríe Moraga and anthropologist Janice Stockard, ’71, MA ’75, PhD ’85.
It’s a big, broad, exhaustive history Freedman reconstructs, as she synthesizes scholarship and activism, wrapping it all in engaging commentary. With almost 100 pages of bibliographic notes and appendices, readers who want more will know where to go. Plus, there’s a working definition that makes a neat transnational tie. What are today’s feminisms about? The belief that men and women are inherently of equal worth.
Freedman began this work in response to a question from Tara VanDerveer, Stanford’s head coach of women’s basketball, who wanted to know what one book she could read to learn about feminist scholarship. It’s all here, Tara.
